At first glance, the November election results look like a recipe for gridlock. With a new Democratic president facing a Republican-controlled Senate—or, perhaps, one only barely in Democratic hands—the prospect of Washington passing sweeping, FDR-style legislation is remote.

That doesn’t mean, however, that big things can’t happen. Indeed, if Joe Biden wants to fulfill the demands of voters—his own, but also the many who chose Trump—for systematic reform, he will have to be more creative and take bigger risks than he might otherwise be inclined to. That will mean challenging the power of oligarchic corporations, using executive authority recent administrations have not tapped, and crafting daring legislation that has a chance of shaking loose at least a few Republican votes in the Senate. 

Meanwhile, liberals and progressives have an opportunity over the next four years to engage in some soul searching about why their hopes for a broader victory in 2020 came up short. Specifically, they need to develop a revamped policy agenda that stands a better chance of widening their circle of support—especially among less-educated working- and middle-class voters, both white and minority, whom they are losing. (Conservatives will certainly be doing the same.)

If you are a longtime reader of this magazine, you will not be shocked to learn that we have thoughts on how this can be done. In fact, this issue is devoted to stories that advance an alternative agenda for the president-elect, congressional Democrats, and persuadable Republicans—though, in truth, Biden doesn’t even need Congress to implement much of what we’re suggesting. 

At the top of the list, Barry Lynn argues, are a suite of anti-monopoly statutes already on the books that Biden can deploy to reshape the American economy. These laws have gone largely unused by every president since Ronald Reagan, with disastrous results. Markets in everything from agriculture to health care to digital technology have been cornered by monopolies that jack up prices, drive down wages, and suppress innovation and entrepreneurship. Biden can start reversing the damage on day one. And with recent antitrust actions by Trump’s Justice Department and the FTC, he may have bipartisan support to do so.

He can also use federal power to enhance the freedom of local communities. As Daniel Block notes, Donald Trump’s most despicable attacks on American democracy in 2020 were directed, in part, at municipalities—like sending in federal security forces to disrupt Black Lives Matter protests in Portland and other cities, and urging GOP election officials in Detroit and elsewhere to overturn the will of the voters. And for the past decade, Republican-controlled state governments have conspired with large corporations to pass laws blocking cities and towns from raising their local minimum wage, banning fracking within their boundaries, and protecting the rights of their own LGBTQ citizens. Biden, on his own initiative, can give localities more power to run their own affairs. He can, for instance, buy back defunct coal power plants from rural electric co-ops, allow municipalities to choose to accept more refugees, and provide cities and towns—including in deep-red parts of the country—with a direct pipeline to federal infrastructure financing.

One of the greatest fears of liberals is that Senate Republicans will try to paralyze whatever policy agenda Biden chooses by refusing to confirm his executive branch nominees. But as Peter Shane points out, a little-noted clause in the U.S. Constitution vests the president with the authority to declare when Congress is in recess if the two houses can’t agree. He can then use his recess appointment power to fill the top ranks of his departments with individuals of his own choosing. It would be a major escalation of the war between the parties. But the mere threat of it might get Mitch McConnell’s attention. If the Senate leader doesn’t budge, Biden should feel free to pull the trigger.

By championing policies like anti-monopolism and local empowerment, the new president can craft something sorely missing in America: a persuasive national narrative. As the election results showed, voters are bitterly divided between two competing visions of our national origins, purpose, and possible future. “One is ethnic and exclusionary,” writes Colin Woodard, “the other is civic and, in principle, universal, though falling far short of that in practice.” If the latter vision cannot soon command a dominant share of the electorate—by, among other things, finally dealing people of color into the American Dream and avoiding unwinnable wars, the latter a goal supported by voters in both parties—Woodard predicts that there will not be a United States 25 years from now. 

Biden’s task is daunting. No president in American history has entered office with so many ongoing catastrophes yet so little support in Congress. His best hope for success is to reimagine the role of the federal government in the lives of average Americans. For too long, Democrats have been torn between centrists afraid of defying large corporations and leftists who define boldness by how much Washington spends on social programs. Today, the former is folly, the latter infeasible. The agenda laid out in this issue of the Washington Monthly provides a way out of this dilemma. It is one that allows the Biden administration to address the country’s greatest challenges with an updated liberalism that has a shot at winning the support of a decisive majority of the American people.

The post Biden’s Hidden Weaponry appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The agents arrived in the middle of July. Dressed in camouflage and sporting body armor, they drove around Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vans and apprehended people who were protesting police brutality. They came seemingly at random, late at night, and patrolled far from the federal property that, ostensibly, they had been sent to protect. One protestor said that the agents pulled his beanie over his eyes after shoving him into the back of their van, making it impossible to see where he was being taken. 

Conducted at the behest of Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, the arrests of the protestors prompted widespread condemnation from Oregon activists and politicians. “This is the stuff of fascist regimes,” Senator Ron Wyden said. The Portland City Council voted to ban local police forces from cooperating with DHS agents. The mayor, Ted Wheeler, told the DHS secretary that he was very concerned about the “violence federal officers brought to our streets”—and that he wanted them out of the city. At first, the Trump administration refused. But after mounting objections, it eventually gave in. Liberals breathed a sigh of relief. They had made it through what had perhaps been, to date, the scariest attack by Donald Trump against American democracy. 

To date. On November 17, after cries of fraud from Trump and state GOP leaders, two Republican officials in Wayne County, Michigan, voted to not certify Detroit’s election results. The maneuver, if successful, would have disenfranchised an overwhelmingly Black city and stolen the state’s Electoral College votes from Biden. Trump and Michigan GOP officials cheered. But, once again, the party’s actions spurred outcry, both from national and local activists. After three hours, the officials gave in.

Though these efforts failed, they reveal something intrinsic about the GOP’s authoritarianism that, relative to its xenophobia, gerrymandering, and attacks on voting rights, hasn’t drawn much scrutiny: During their most autocratic moments, Republicans often target municipalities. During the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump sent the military into Washington, D.C. In addition to Portland, the president sent armed DHS officers to at least a dozen other municipalities. That included larger cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Kansas City, Missouri. It also included smaller ones like Port Huron, Michigan, and GOP-governed Pearland, Texas. The president called for swing states to toss out ballots not just from Detroit but from Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.

In the public imagination, Republicans have traditionally been the party that promotes local choice and liberty, and the Democratic Party has been the one that regulates from on high. The latter earned this reputation in the 1960s, when it passed landmark legislation overturning state and local laws that mandated racial segregation and suppressed Black people’s voting rights. The party bolstered it in the 1970s, when Democrats in Congress drove the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, both of which imposed restrictions on local zoning and land use in service of protecting the natural world. 

Though these and other proud liberal achievements were essential and validated as constitutional, they caused a massive political backlash that enabled the rise of movement conservatism. Ronald Reagan swept into power promising “to put an end to the merry-go-round where our money becomes Washington’s money, to be spent by the states and cities exactly the way the federal bureaucrats tell them to.” Ever since, the GOP has centered part of its brand on reverence for local decision-making. In his campaign platform, George W. Bush emphasized the need to provide “flexibility and control to states and local communities,” especially on education. While rolling back fair housing regulations, the Trump administration proclaimed that it was “protecting American communities from excessive Federal overreach and preserving local decision-making.” Republicans even smear as tyranny policies they had a hand in creating, including key parts of the environmental statutes of the 1970s (signed by then President Richard Nixon).

But, in truth, Republicans have never really cared about “local decision-making” as a principle. Reagan threatened to revoke highway funding from any state that didn’t raise its drinking age to 21. Under Bush, Republicans forced many municipalities to weaken regulations on consumer safety. Trump tried to withhold millions of dollars from localities that wouldn’t cooperate with federal immigration officers. Republicans, like Democrats, are quite happy to restrict communities when it suits their purposes. Yet rather than doing so to protect individual rights like voting, or defend against market externalities like pollution, Republicans tend to do so in service of social conservatism or what they see as economic rights—which in practice means the rights of large corporations. 

This has become especially pronounced in the past decade, as Republicans have used their dominance of state governments to take away powers from communities at breakneck pace. Under the auspices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of corporate lobbyists and right-wing state legislators, Republicans have made life easy for big businesses by making it difficult for localities. The vast majority of states with a Republican legislature and governor now have laws prohibiting, or “preempting,” municipalities from raising their minimum wage. Many, like Louisiana, bar towns from restricting oil drilling and gas fracking. At the behest of telecommunications monopolists, some GOP-run states, such as Mississippi, have started banning localities from setting up their own broadband internet networks. With the encouragement of religious conservatives, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina have killed local ordinances prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination. And last July, with the support of the state’s restaurant association, Republican Governor Brian Kemp blocked multiple cities in Georgia from implementing mask requirements.

Democrats are still happy to impose on cities and towns. In a 2017 study, the political scientists Mallory SoRelle and Alexis Walker found that Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to pass preemption statutes at the federal level (though more recent research shows that state preemption statutes are much more likely to pass when Republicans have unified control of government than when Democrats do). But when Democrats preempt, they generally do so in a very different way. According to SoRelle and Walker, Democrats tend to restrict local authority by setting regulatory floors. Republicans do so by creating regulatory ceilings. The former is inherently less restrictive than the latter. For example, the Card Act of 2009, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by President Barack Obama, created baseline federal consumer protections for credit cards but left state and local governments free to go further. When the GOP caps minimum wages, it gives localities an extremely narrow band—or sometimes no band—in which to operate.

Indeed, if you look back far enough, it becomes clear that liberals have a long history of actively empowering municipalities. In the Progressive Era, Democrats used federal power to make upgrades for local governments, changes that are now largely forgotten but at the time were much appreciated. They established, for example, a federal Office of Markets in 1913 that offered direct assistance to struggling municipally run food bazaars, where most people shopped at the time. That tradition carried over into the New Deal era. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the ur-Democrat, may be best remembered for the Social Security Act, but his reforms consciously helped communities as distinct entities. To bring electricity to rural America, he created the Rural Electrification Administration, which offered loans to small towns that were cut off or price gouged by large electrical utilities. He and his successor, Harry Truman, also signed multiple antitrust laws, like the Celler-Kefauver Act, that protected local economies from being dominated by retailers in distant cities. 

But it’s been decades since progressives have tapped this strategy of supporting localities. While they have reliably championed federal aid to local governments in times of emergency, Democrats have mostly focused their energies on nationwide projects directed and run from Washington, such as expanding health insurance. That’s true of Joe Biden’s policy vision, too, such as his plan for massive investments in green energy. These are important endeavors, worth working hard for—even if they will be extremely difficult to achieve without solid Democratic control of Congress. 

Yet at a time when Republicans are openly trying to suppress the freedom of local communities to govern themselves, Biden and his party have an obligation to fight back. That won’t be easy without strong majorities in Congress. But by rediscovering the older progressive tradition of using the federal government to help cities and towns, Biden will find that there is quite a bit he can do by executive action. 

Democrats will also discover that this strategy is not only good policy but also good politics. Poll after poll shows that local governments are far more trusted than the federal government. In 2020, for example, Gallup found that 71 percent of Americans—including 69 percent of Republicans—have at least a “fair amount” of trust in local governments, compared to 43 percent in the federal executive branch and 33 percent in Congress. A 2018 Pew Research Center study found that 69 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats have favorable opinions of their local governments, far above the 44 percent and 28 percent, respectively, who view the federal government positively. That dim view of Washington has long been a liability for Democrats, who must find ways to improve the public’s trust in our national government. Using federal power to help local communities could achieve that—and it might turn a liability into an advantage. 

Public opinion might not stop GOP senators from voting down a Democratic-sponsored bill that, for example, gives towns the freedom to set up their own broadband networks rather than rely on the poor service of telecom monopolies. But when Republicans do so they will pay a reputational price, while burnishing the image of Democrats as the party of local freedom. Democrats will make even greater gains when, through Biden’s executive power, they fund public broadband providers anyway.

Blue cities in red states likely stand to gain the most from such policies, given that they have been the most aggressively manhandled by conservative legislators. But there are plenty of small towns in red America that would benefit as well, and their citizens would be surprised to see Democrats fighting on their side. The great debate in electoral politics on the left has long been whether to prioritize policies that energize the base or ones that have a chance of pulling in swing voters. Championing local empowerment allows Democrats to do both. 

Infrastructure

Perhaps the one area in which even hardened Washington insiders say there is room for the two parties to collaborate is infrastructure. Despite his talk about the need for new infrastructure spending, Trump had neither the desire nor the skills to pull off any kind of legislative compromise. But we can be sure that Biden will try. 

His first address to a joint session of Congress would be the perfect time for Biden to announce that, as president, he is going to defend the interests of local communities. Transportation policy is a great opening foray. Under present law, roughly 70 percent of all federal transportation dollars are automatically routed through states. Biden should propose letting municipalities and regional government bodies, like those that build and manage mass transit systems, apply directly for almost all federal transportation funding. This would place local and regional entities on an equal footing with state transportation departments. That’s essential, because in many states, departments of transportation are effectively run by rural lawmakers who are exclusively interested in funding highways.

One small but telling example is how dollars from the federal government’s Transportation Alternatives Program get spent. Each year, the program sends $850 million to states for bike lanes, sidewalks, and other pedestrian improvement projects. It’s exactly the kind of funding that many municipalities, including downtowns in otherwise rural places, desperately want and need. But loopholes inserted by congressional Republicans allow governors to easily divert the money elsewhere. Between 2012 and 2017, roughly $635 million in TAP funding was moved out of the program, away from biking and pedestrian projects, and toward roadway upgrades. Tens of millions more was simply not spent, either returned to the federal government or disappearing from existence. (The GOP leads the vast majority of states where both the diversion and the wasting have taken place.) Letting localities apply to the federal government directly, rather than relying on states to do the right thing, would cut back on the leakage.

The obvious vehicle for putting localities and states on an equal footing is the next federal transportation bill, which Congress must craft and pass early in Biden’s term. Republicans will almost certainly refuse. Altering the funding rules could take years of negotiations, even with a heavily Democratic Congress. But in trying to fix this system, Biden would have at least signaled to cities and towns across the country whose side he is on. 

He also has ways to act alone. Shortly before he left office, Obama signed legislation that expanded two investment programs in the federal Department of Transportation: TIFIA (named for its enabling legislation, the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act); and the Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing program, or RRIF. Together, the programs have billions of dollars to finance everything from bike lanes and sidewalks to light rail and train stations using long-term, low-interest loans. Localities can apply for funding without asking their states. 

Trump ignored both programs entirely. Biden shouldn’t. Instead, he should direct his Department of Transportation to use them liberally, to loudly invite localities from across the country to apply, and to personally hand over the resources to local officials in Rose Garden ceremonies.

Biden could also make direct spending more local friendly. Right now, the Department of Transportation’s roadway advice—followed by many state transportation departments—is largely tailored to making traffic flow as quickly as possible, irrespective of where the traffic is. Federal guidance should instead explicitly tell state departments to ask communities what kinds of roads they want. Even very rural places prefer slower roads in their downtowns. The reasoning experts offer makes sense: In addition to being safer for pedestrians, slower traffic is more likely to lead people to stop, walk around, and patronize businesses.

These changes would help more American towns—and, by extension, the people who live in them—develop the kind of infrastructure they want and need. And if the tweaks came over strong Republican opposition, it would signal to towns both large and small that it is liberals who care about helping communities.

Environment and Energy

Biden made climate change a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. His $2 trillion plan, the most ambitious climate initiative ever released by a major-party presidential nominee, managed to win praise from both establishment environmentalists and younger, more progressive activists. Unfortunately, it could run into a brick wall—the Senate. But that shouldn’t deter him. If Democrats in Congress cannot break a filibuster or pass major climate legislation through reconciliation, the president-elect should tell Mitch McConnell (and maybe Joe Manchin) that he will do what his predecessor did when Congress wouldn’t fund the border wall: declare a national emergency.

The GOP won’t be moved for a variety of reasons. But if one is that they believe Biden is bluffing, the president-elect should prove them wrong. As Biden noted in his campaign platform, climate change is “an existential threat” where “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale.” He therefore shouldn’t hesitate to act in a sweeping and dramatic fashion. Declaring an emergency under the National Emergencies Act would free Biden to redirect some military spending to renewable energy projects, like new solar power installations. That might seem like a gross misuse of Department of Defense spending, but the Pentagon and its senior officials have repeatedly referred to climate change as a serious national security threat. In 2018, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote that climate change causes “great devastation requiring humanitarian assistance/disaster relief, which the U.S. military certainly conducts routinely.” It’s entirely reasonable for Biden to use military money to address this unfolding crisis. The Pentagon already does.

But, critically, Biden could use the emergency powers to help local communities. Since 1991, more than 600 municipal governments have developed plans to control greenhouse gas emissions. In 2010 and 2011, more than 70 regional commissions created sustainability plans. Many of these initiatives were spurred by funding in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package. Unfortunately, after taking control of Congress in 2011, the GOP refused to fund these local plans any further, rendering many of them nothing more than blueprints. But by using national emergency powers, Biden could provide loan guarantees to communities so they can complete, or at least further, their green initiatives. He could even use some of the military spending to fund these projects outright. That would be in stark contrast to Trump’s emergency declaration, which used military spending to build new fencing in border communities that vocally opposed it.

If Biden doesn’t want to declare a national emergency on his own, he could still use executive actions in ways that would help fight against climate change and liberate municipalities. This isn’t just for liberals. Even some conservative cities, like Denton, Texas, have tried to limit or ban fossil fuel extraction within their boundaries. Unfortunately, in the case of Denton, the GOP-controlled Texas legislature responded by prohibiting towns from regulating oil or fracking. Republicans in Oklahoma and North Carolina followed suit. The Biden administration might be able to stop these states, even without Congress’s help. Under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has not just the authority to regulate greenhouse gases, but also a legal obligation to do so. The Obama administration mandated that each state reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to a certain target. Biden should consider bringing back state reduction targets. At a minimum, he should mandate that states let localities cut emissions on their own by invoking the federal government’s power to regulate carbon levels. (He should also allow California to again set its own air quality and gas mileage standards, a freedom Trump revoked.) Conservative judges might stop him. Yet the very act would signal that if you want your town to be more eco-friendly, it isn’t Democrats who object.

Local climate empowerment goes beyond just fighting against states. Biden could use the Rural Utilities Service to help rural electric cooperatives, which supply power to just over 10 percent of America’s population, switch away from coal. Right now, these cooperatives are highly dependent on aging fossil fuel power plants, many of which are far more expensive and less effective than greener sources of energy. Through executive action alone, Biden could instruct the Rural Utilities Service to purchase the defunct or unprofitable dirty power plants of any co-op that agreed to switch to solar or wind. Given how cheap the latter two energy sources are becoming, it would be an extremely generous offer, one that cleans the environment simply by giving communities a choice. 

Finally, the president-elect should make good on one of his campaign promises: helping regions develop climate resilience plans “in partnership with local universities and national labs, for local access to the most relevant science, data, information, tools, and training.” This assistance will be especially valuable for the many cities and towns that don’t have climate plans not because they don’t want them, but because preparing for a warming world requires technical, environmental expertise that most cities simply cannot afford. The EPA can offer such expertise, alone and in partnership with other institutions. Biden should make sure they do.

Broadband

High-speed internet is an essential service. Especially at a time when many jobs are, by epidemiological necessity, done online, it’s impossible for communities without broadband to attract various types of employers or workers. When school is virtual, kids in places without high-speed internet are seriously disadvantaged. Even before the pandemic, median household incomes, employment rates, and the number of firms all grew significantly faster in counties with broadband than in counties without it.

Unfortunately, there are many such counties. According to a recent report by the broadband consumer company Broadband Now, as many as 42 million Americans lack broadband access. The lack of access is particularly pervasive in rural areas, but it’s common in poorer urban neighborhoods as well. There are also tens of millions of people who could theoretically purchase broadband internet but cannot afford it. 

This patchwork system is the product of major telecom companies, such as Comcast or Cox. These corporations have decided that providing broadband access to certain parts of America is not sufficiently profitable. To compensate, some communities have formed broadband cooperatives or companies of their own. The benefits have been enormous. When Chattanooga, Tennessee, set up its own broadband provider in 2007, it kickstarted a surge of entrepreneurism that ultimately created more than 500 businesses. A study from the University of Tennessee found that between 2011 and 2015, Chattanooga’s city-owned broadband provider generated $1 billion for the local economy.

But at least 22 states, a full half of which are under unified GOP control, have passed laws pushed by wealthy telecom companies that ban or severely limit municipal broadband. That includes Tennessee, where telecom monopolists were so spooked by Chattanooga’s success that they got the state legislature to make it impossible for other places to replicate what the city did.

As it happens, the Federal Communications Commission is empowered by statute to facilitate communications by “removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.” If Biden obtains a majority on the FCC—it currently has a 2–2 split—the agency should go to court to challenge states’ preemption power in this area. Conservative judges might overrule the agency’s effort, as they did the one time FCC lawyers attempted this during the Obama administration. But there’s no reason the agency can’t try again if it has the opportunity. Just like with the EPA order, the very act, if cheered on by Biden, would signal to communities across America—and especially in rural areas—that his administration is on their side. (Legislation clarifying the FCC’s power might nonetheless be the ultimate answer.)

Meanwhile, if Democrats do get a majority on the FCC, there’s an easy, clear step the agency should take to support local broadband projects. Right now, the commission spends tens of billions of dollars annually to prop up major telecom companies, some of it for the express purpose of expanding broadband. It has not worked, and it’s time to try a different approach. Without any action from Congress, the commission could redirect most, if not all, of these billions to municipal and co-op projects. Doing so would allow these entities to bring high-speed internet to millions more Americans.

Immigration

Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 by loudly railing against immigration. He gave the issue far less emphasis during his 2020 race. Exactly why is anyone’s guess, but it may be because his nativist rhetoric and policies caused a huge backlash, including among GOP voters. According to Gallup, more than 70 percent of Americans now believe that immigration is “a good thing,” the highest level in at least 20 years. The shift is especially dramatic when it comes to refugees, thanks in large part to Republicans changing their minds. According to Pew, support for letting in refugees climbed among GOP voters from 40 percent in 2016 to an astonishing 58 percent in 2019. 

The United States is still very much struggling with xenophobia. The public’s general attitude toward immigration may be highly positive, and support for letting in refugees may be quite high. But polling shows that support for increasing immigration writ large is at best a plurality—neck and neck with support for decreasing immigration and keeping levels the same. So as Biden overturns Trump’s policies and makes America more welcoming, as he’s promised to do, he will have to work hard to avoid having public opinion shift back. 

There’s evidence that the president-elect understands this. His 2020 campaign platform called for an entirely new visa category allowing cities and counties “to petition for higher levels of immigrants to support their growth.” It’s a shrewd idea. In a 2016 quantitative study published in Political Psychology, several academics found that Americans’ “hostility toward immigration decreases” when citizens “feel that they, and/or their country, are more in control” of the process. Adding a strong local element to our immigration system could significantly bolster Americans’ sense of control over migration into the country and, with it, their desire to take in more people.

Biden will need the support of Congress to create the new visa program. It’s a good bet that Republicans won’t provide it and will filibuster attempts to create it. But he should still push for the category because the politics are great. In fact, he should double down on the idea and apply it to an area in which presidents have near unilateral authority: determining how many refugees the U.S. accepts each year. Biden has already pledged to raise the refugee cap to 125,000—the highest level since 1993. But he should publicly commit to increasing refugee numbers even higher during his term if local governments want a greater influx. This would not be a radical change; traditionally, the federal government consults with state officials, local officials, and nonprofit resettlement agencies to determine each year’s refugee ceiling. But Biden should make sure local citizens are aware of and engaged in the decision by adding clearer public notifications to the process.

This would be in the proud liberal tradition of establishing floors, not ceilings. Local communities wouldn’t be able to say no to all refugees, but they could decide for themselves whether to welcome additional numbers. The more places that do, the higher the overall number of refugees the federal government would let in. In all likelihood, it would be a lot, because local officials and business leaders are well aware that refugees start businesses, take hard-to-fill jobs (such as in meat-packing plants), and revitalize depopulated towns and neighborhoods. “There are thousands of communities around the United States that are ready to say, ‘Please, send us refugees,’ ” says Mark Storella, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration from 2016 to 2018. 

If you doubt him, consider what happened after Trump issued an executive order in 2019 giving governors the ability to block refugees from coming into their states. Only one governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, chose to exercise that power. And when he did, mayors across the Lone Star State, including conservatives such as Fort Worth’s Betsy Price, fought back. (A federal judge eventually issued an injunction against Trump’s executive order because of the administration’s typically sloppy legal craftsmanship.) 

The policies above are just a few examples of how bolstering local power could help Biden politically. But there are plenty of other opportunities. The president-elect, for instance, should propose a federal jobs program for the millions of Americans who are unemployed because of the pandemic. But rather than have Washington heavily involved in managing the program, Biden should call for a radically decentralized approach in which the federal government issues qualified applicants vouchers they could use to get jobs at nonprofits chosen by state and local governments. 

Vigorously enforcing anti-monopoly statutes, as Barry Lynn argues in “How Biden Can Transform America” (page 20), would also help distribute power in ways that revive communities. By breaking up Google and Facebook’s near-total control of digital advertising, for instance, Biden could give local newspapers back the revenue that once sustained them—and that they desperately need.

In advocating for local empowerment, Biden would be pushing on an open political door. There is growing grassroots energy and anger, particularly in blue cities within red states, about the ways conservatives have blocked off progressive policies. The Partnership for Working Families, for instance, was founded as a network of local activist groups fighting to advance progressive causes in their communities—from climate change to housing rights. The group’s chapters have become increasingly focused on the challenges preemption laws present. Protests by a variety of organizations over North Carolina’s infamous “bathroom bill,” which originated as a way to preempt Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance, eventually forced the state to repeal part of its law. 

There is also some support for devolving power to local governments among center-right intellectuals. The New York Times columnist David Brooks and the National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, for example, have expressed deep concern for the civic health of local communities. These worries are well founded. Declining social capital has been relentlessly documented for years by social scientists revered by liberals, such as Robert Putnam. Brooks and Levin have both argued that giving more power to cities and towns might be a cure. “By putting more meaningful authority and power nearer to [the] level of the community,” Levin recently wrote, the U.S. stands “a better chance of drawing more citizens into the public arena, and so helping to mitigate the isolation that afflicts so many Americans.” His words suggest that in advancing an agenda of local empowerment, Democrats might find conservative allies.

As an institution, the Republican Party will not be one of them. Its authoritarian impulses lead it to attack municipalities whenever they deviate from its ideology or undermine its power. The GOP’s desire to constrain more urban areas of the country may even be explicitly designed to hurt political opponents. “Trump knows, like most Republicans, that the people who live in walkable, urban, dense places don’t vote for people like them,” says Chris Leinberger, a professor at George Washington University and the head of the school’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Development. “They would love to keep financing roads and keep moving people further and further out, because exurban households and rural households tend to vote Republican.”

It will be difficult for Democrats to entirely stop the GOP from restricting cities and towns without firm control of Congress. It will help if they win power in more states. But now that Joe Biden is president, the party is not powerless. By championing community governance, they can fight back.

The post How Biden Can Use Federal Power to Liberate Localities  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

That the bonds holding the United States have been weakening has been obvious for more than a decade. We’re divided into red states and blue states and split into geographic blocks that track back to those of the Civil War, whose representatives might as well come from different planets with regard to ideas about the proper role of government, the relationship between church and state, and the connection between individual liberty and the common good. Congress went from being incapable of reliably raising the debt ceiling to being unable to agree that foreign interference in our elections is bad. 

Over the past year, the country’s fractures have only widened. An absence of federal leadership on the pandemic left states divided on largely regional grounds on how to respond. Revelations of continued police brutality against Black Americans led to mass multiracial demonstrations, and then counter-demonstrations by white people carrying Confederate flags. President Donald Trump’s post-election rants against the results of a free and fair election raised the specter of an attempted coup while garnering wide support from many voters and elected officials in his party. All these developments underscored how far we’ve drifted from the fundamental ideals that have managed to hold our awkward federation together for 244 years, the ones in the Declaration of Independence: the inherent equality of humans and their rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and representative self-government. A union Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of Earth” is in danger of collapse.

Joe Biden’s victory in November has bought us time. It’s essential that we make good use of it. Much needs to be done, from defeating COVID-19 to rebuilding overseas alliances to reestablishing the independence of the Department of Justice. But none of it will matter if we are not also able to restore our lost sense of shared belonging and common purpose. 

Intellectuals from Jill Lepore and Michael Lind to David Brooks and Ross Douthat have pointed to the need for a new national story, or possibly a renewed one, in order to provide a communal identity incorporating an understanding of our national origins, purpose, and possible future. People need such a story and, as Lepore has put it, “they can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues, but get it they will.” A society without a credible story, the historian William McNeill wrote 38 years ago, “soon finds itself in deep trouble, for in the absence of believable myths, coherent public action becomes very difficult to improvise or sustain.”

We stand at a crossroads, as we did in the 1870s, with two paths before us, two American stories. One is ethnic and exclusionary; the other is civic and, in principle, universal, though falling far short of that in practice. They each have their own heroes, iconography, and present-day standard-bearers: Jefferson Davis, the Confederate battle flag, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump on one hand; Abraham Lincoln, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, and the Black Lives Matter movement on the other. Each of these traditions, these explanations for why and for whom the United States exists, grew out of a separate regional culture and yet succeeded in becoming the dominant, consensus view across the federation for decades. Now neither holds sway. Instead, they have been literally clashing with one another in the streets. 

If the United States is to survive as a unified democracy, we need to rediscover, reinvigorate, and adapt our lost civic national story for 21st-century life and finally put the ethno-national one in the trash bin of history. Given that more than 70 million citizens recently failed to condemn the exclusionary narrative at the polls, this will be challenging. But there are grounds for hope that our better angels might prevail. Trump spent four years demonizing nonwhite immigrants as hut dwellers, rapists, and murderers, and deploying federal agents against those protesting the murder of Black people by law enforcement. Yet over the course of his administration, public support for taking in immigrants reached record highs, and white support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased from 40 percent in the summer of 2016 to 45 percent in September. The country remains bitterly divided. But if support for inclusion increases in the face of hate, then we have a chance, and we must take it.

Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a special challenge for the United States, arguably the world’s first civic nation—one defined not by organic ties, but by a shared commitment to a set of ideals. It came into being as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for 13 disparate colonies facing a common enemy. Its people lacked a shared history, religion, or ethnicity. (Pennsylvania, for example, had a German plurality in 1776, while South Carolina had an African majority.) There was no common language, and most of the country’s residents hadn’t occupied the continent long enough to imagine it as their mythic homeland. Its component states had been founded by completely different groups of settlers—Puritans in New England, Dutch in what is now the New York City metropolitan area, Scots-Irish in the Appalachian backcountry, slave lords from the English West Indies in the lowlands of the Deep South, and so on—with often incompatible political, economic, ethnographic, and religious characteristics. 

By the 1830s, the federation’s identity crisis had reached a tipping point. It had weathered Appalachian and New England secession movements in the 1790s and 1810s, the former in resistance to the machinations of self-interested financiers, the latter fueled by regional opposition to the War of 1812. The stopgap remedy—to celebrate the shared struggle of the American Revolution—had lost its strength as the Founders’ generation passed from the scene, leaving a gaping void. Americans knew they needed a story of U.S. nationhood if their experiment were to survive.

The first person to package and present such a story was the historian-statesman George Bancroft, the son of a famous Massachusetts Unitarian preacher. After graduating from Harvard in 1817 at the age of 17, he was sent on an epic study-abroad trip to the German Confederation, where he studied under Arnold Heeren, Georg Hegel, and other intellectuals who were developing the ideas of Germanic nationhood. He chummed around with the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, and Johann Goethe; backpacked from Paris to Rome; and returned home, doctorate in hand, with his head churning with ideas about his country’s place in the world. After failing in bids to be a poet, professor, prep school master, and preacher, Bancroft set to what would prove his life’s work: giving his young nation a history. He sought to answer those great questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? 

His vision—laid out in his epic 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms and from a plan history had laid out for them. It held that Americans had been charged by Providence to implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom, and that this promise was open to people everywhere. “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

Americans, hungry for answers when Bancroft’s first volume appeared in 1834, seized on his ideas and have never completely let them go. They helped center the Declaration of Independence as America’s core ideal. They informed the teaching of U.S. history for the better part of a century, inspired epic paintings in the U.S. Capitol rotunda, and prompted one of Bancroft’s fans, the journalist John O’Sullivan, to opine about America’s “manifest destiny.” 

Which raises the dark side of this iteration of our national myth: the notion that the United States, being the object of God’s special favor, does not operate under the same constraints as all the other nations, that we’re excepted from normal rules and, in that sense, “exceptional.” We could not fail in the mission we had been tasked with, Bancroft counseled, so we didn’t need to take forceful action to confront obvious shortcomings, like the fact that the economic, political, and social affairs of half the federation were constructed around an extremely violent race-based slave system. Nothing would shake him from this complacent view—not the Civil War (which he had predicted would not take place) nor the collapse of Reconstruction in the face of a deadly terrorist campaign to roll back the political emancipation of Black people in the occupied Confederacy. 

Indeed, Bancroft’s neo-Puritan belief that Americans were chosen people led him to actively participate in the conquests of empire. As secretary of the navy and acting secretary of war in James Polk’s administration, he personally wrote the orders that would result in the annexations of California and Texas and the reimposition of slavery in the latter. “If you can do that—why, what is your . . . whole history of freedom, but a piece of brilliant declamation?” Theodore Parker, the great Unitarian intellectual, asked him at the time. “I love noble words as well as you, but I love deeds worthy of noble words—love them far better.” 

American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. can walk on water when other nations cannot, is a thread of our civic national narrative that has repeatedly led us astray. We can do better—and do better by our core ideals—without it.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. He knew Bancroft’s work and had met the historian on multiple occasions before and during the war. But when he delivered the Gettysburg Address, the president presented this civic national myth—“a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—not as our destiny, but as an ideal that had not been achieved and, if not fought for, could perish from the earth. Had he not been assassinated, Lincoln might have been able to deliver on that promise. 

Instead, it would be betrayed.

The discomforting truth is that Bancroft’s version of our national myth was challenged from the outset by the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country. These men—they were all men—had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the purpose of the United States was to be. 

People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the antebellum South’s leading man of letters, and the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people which conquers, also educates the inferior; and their reward for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter,” he proclaimed in a seminal 1837 essay in the Southern Literary Messenger, then the South’s leading journal.

While Bancroft had done his best to ignore the presence of slavery, Simms and other lowland southerners argued that it was in fact one of the “greatest moral goods & blessings, and that slavery in all ages has been found the greatest and most admirable agent of Civilization,” creating a stable society with the master race in command. When the U.S. was considering whether to annex Texas in 1847, Simms urged John C. Calhoun to do it not for the good of the federation but of slavery in the Deep South, which he expected would continue expanding southward into Mexico. “In the case of Texas, so, beyond the Rio Grande, what we once acquired would ensure to the South and to the South exclusively,” Simms explained. “It might ultimately help us to a sufficiently large republic of our own.” If Mexico were conquered, he predicted, it would “ensure the perpetuation of slavery for the next thousand years.” 

The Confederacy lost the war, and for a brief period after, their vision was swept aside. The 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteed birthright citizenship and equal civic and legal protections and made it unconstitutional to deny voting rights on the basis of race. For more than a decade, these provisions were enforced. Black people served in statehouses and Congress. But eventually, the Confederates won the peace. Reconstruction collapsed, the amendments were effectively annulled by the Supreme Court, and nonwhites in the South were systematically subjugated to a caste system.

In response, Americans adapted the national narrative to find common ground between northerners and southerners, now clearly destined to live together in a strong nation-state. The new story, described in detail by David Blight in Race and Reunion, accepted the Deep South’s point of view on race and systematically forgot the moral content of the war: that slavery was central to the Confederate project and, thus, the conflict itself. The liberal nationalist vision of Bancroft, Lincoln, and the towering public intellectual and activist Frederick Douglass was jettisoned in favor of what was effectively an ethno-nationalist model.

This model was developed and propagated by the fiction of Thomas Dixon Jr. in the first great Hollywood blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, and via the actions of his friend Woodrow Wilson, the first U.S. president from the Deep South. Wilson, who was quoted repeatedly in the film, screened it in the White House, amplifying and tacitly endorsing its white-supremacist message. He segregated the federal government, opposed women’s suffrage, and at the Paris Peace Conference blocked a Japanese measure professing the equality of the races. Democratic self-government, he argued, was not the heritage of mankind but “the heritage of races purged alike of hasty barbaric passions and of patient servility to rulers, and schooled in temperate common counsel.”

It was in this era that the vast majority of the South’s Confederate monuments were erected, each an homage to this illiberal, white-supremacist vision of the United States. (The Robert E. Lee statue at the center of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally—where torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us”—was erected in 1924.) The second Klan, founded in Atlanta on the eve of the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation in that city, grew to a million members by 1921 and as many as five million in 1925. It sought to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, beating, or killing Black Americans, Mexicans, Asians, Catholics, eastern Europeans, and most any other non-Anglo-Saxons. Members included a small army of future governors, senators, and big-city mayors and at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. They were joined in spirit (if not in action) by elite northeasterners who believed in eugenics, including the children of some abolitionist activists.

This was a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy, a homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group. It long outlived Wilson and though especially virulent in its treatment of Black people targeted other communities as well. The ethnic and racial quotas in the 1924 Immigration Act throttled arrivals of eastern and southern Europeans, Africans, Arabs, and Asians. By 1960, more than eight in 10 immigrants were from Europe and Canada, and the proportion of foreign-born people in the country had fallen by almost two-thirds. From Dick and Jane to Leave It to Beaver, from Barbie dolls to “flesh”-colored Crayola crayons, children in the 1950s and ’60s were taught that they lived in a Euro-American society.

But even before Leave It to Beaver, things were changing. Starting in the 1930s, “othered” European ethnic groups—Irish, Quebecois, Italians, Slavs—were slowly, begrudgingly admitted into the camp of belongers, which had been rebranded from “Anglo-Saxon Protestant” to “Christian” and eventually, in some circles, “Judeo-Christian” white. The New Deal, and the political coalition Franklin D. Roosevelt forged to support it, advanced the interests of many of these white ethnic communities, though plenty of his programs effectively excluded Black people in the South to avoid displeasing the southern senators upon which their survival depended. 

Mass conscription in both world wars produced multiethnic units and multiracial armies, whose members felt they’d earned the rights to full citizenship and consecrated them with blood sacrifices. The conflicts also vividly demonstrated the dangers of ethno-nationalism and dehumanizing the other in a quest to purify a master race. Herrenvolk democracy was much harder to champion after witnessing how Adolf Hitler had practiced it. The notion that the world was best run by Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon, or Aryan minds was discredited on the killing fields of Belgium and in the death camps of east-central Europe. And what made America different and better than the Axis powers, as every Hollywood depiction of World War II blared, was its righteous inclusion, its commitment to democracy, human dignity, and the rule of law. 

These forces came to a head in the 1960s, in simultaneous movements that compelled a recommitment to the forgotten promises of American civic nationhood. The civil rights movement toppled southern apartheid and challenged northern racism. The feminist movement demanded social, professional, and sexual equality for a gender that comprised the majority of the population. Gays and lesbians fought the police and discriminatory ordinances. Elite colleges began partially dismantling their old boys’ networks, and public universities rapidly expanded to increase educational opportunities. Congress passed a new immigration law in 1965 that repealed ethno-national quotas, reopening America’s gates to humanity at large, rather than a chosen people. A new generation of historians challenged the neo-Confederate narrative of American history that had dominated scholastic textbooks for a half century, while dispelling the innocence of American colonization of the continent.

So for the generation of Americans born from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, liberal civic nationalism was the received national story. Racism and prejudice were believed to be on the wane. Equal opportunity was on the rise. Western intellectuals convinced themselves that the triumph of liberal democracy and global capitalism was so complete that they’d rendered nationhood obsolete, here and abroad. The dark side had finally been vanquished, tossed into the dumpsters of history alongside the tenets of Soviet communism. 

In reality, the Second Reconstruction was never fully finished, and much like the First Reconstruction, it was under attack from the moment it appeared triumphant. Civic nationalism withered, making it possible for Donald Trump to ascend to the White House like the Redeemers of old. His Herrenvolk vision, spelled out by the president explicitly, excludes the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims (would-be targets of a travel ban); Mexican and Central American immigrants (“drug dealers, criminals, rapists”); and anyone from Haiti, El Salvador, and other designated “shithole countries,” which would appear to include sub-Saharan Africa. (Trump, in these latter remarks, said we should welcome Norwegians instead.)

Thankfully, he lost his bid for a second term. But now we must rebuild.

The challenges to building a dominant, persuasive, civic nationalist politics are formidable. One-third of the country appears to wholeheartedly embrace ethno-nationalism. These are the Americans who not only vote for Trump but also love him and his crude, exclusionary vision of the United States. (There are also plenty of Trump voters who don’t share his ethno-nationalism and might happily support a more civic nationalist presidential candidate—though probably only if they were Republican.) 

Another major segment of the population, mostly younger Americans on the political left, believe in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence but argue—because the promises America made to Black, Indigenous, and other nonwhite people have been so consistently not met, and because American foreign power has been so brutally thrown around—that racism and imperialism are immutable aspects of our character and system. The only way to convince this rising generation to enthusiastically embrace a civic nationalist story is to prove them wrong—that is, to deliver domestic policies that finally give a fair deal to Black Americans and a foreign policy that keeps the peace without embroiling the country in brutal and endless wars. 

This obviously won’t happen overnight. It is the work of a generation.

I’m not sure we’ll succeed. But because Trump so overplayed his hand, there is a real opening. According to Gallup, more than 70 percent of Americans believe immigration is a “good thing,” the highest percentage in at least 20 years. His wild excesses helped forge a multiracial coalition for racial justice; prompted an unprecedented society-wide reckoning with sexual harassment and cultural exclusion; and catalyzed the purging of ethno-nationalist monuments, symbols, and figures from public squares and private institutions alike. It’s no small feat to have prompted the NFL to reverse itself on players taking a knee for racial justice or gotten NASCAR, of all organizations, to ban the Confederate flag. Trump may have galvanized a huge coalition that’s cool with autocracy, but this country still has a civic-minded majority, and he’s managed to wake it from its slumber. Now it needs goals and leaders.

Biden seems to get the leadership angle. Throughout the campaign he made the championing of our civic national narrative a core theme. His addresses have woven in references to Theodore Parker’s long “arc of the moral universe” and its bent toward justice as well as to Lincoln’s “angels of our better nature.” Previous Democratic presidents, including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, used similar language. But with increasing public support for racial justice and immigration, Biden may have more luck. He’s certainly looking to tap directly into this upsurge in tolerance. At Gettysburg a month before Election Day, the president-elect pledged to confront the ethno-nationalists as Lincoln had and to not allow “extremists and white supremacists to overturn the America of Lincoln and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.” 

Call it rhetoric, but rhetoric has power. That’s part of why Biden must stop using the tainted language of American exceptionalism. In his victory speech, for example, the president-elect claimed that “there has never been anything we have tried and not been able to do,” as if we had eradicated poverty, defeated North Vietnam, brought peace to the Middle East, and imposed liberal democratic norms on the occupied Confederacy during Reconstruction. For left-leaning young Americans who hold a dim view of U.S. history, jettisoning these kinds of statements is a must. Carrying out a more restrained foreign policy will also help attract their support, as well as, paradoxically, some backing from the right. On most military matters, Trump’s foreign policy was comparatively restrained, shaped by our recent history of fighting unwinnable wars. There’s a strange bipartisan consensus for a less interventionist America.

Domestically, Biden has a heavier policy lift. There’s a laundry list of ethno-nationalist actions the president-elect must reverse, from the kidnapping of migrant toddlers to the Muslim immigration ban, but this is just a start. Furthering the Declaration’s mission requires ending the laissez-faire tack our country has been on for the past 50 years, one that’s eroded equality of opportunity, fomenting discord across the political spectrum. If he ever gains control of Congress, Biden must pass laws that rechannel wealth—especially inherited wealth—in ways that reverse the outrageous inequities, racial as well as class, that have built up in recent decades. That money should be put not only into programs that level the playing field for those born without advantages, like early childhood education and health insurance coverage, but also into people’s pockets, through such things as student debt relief and “baby bonds”—money provided at birth to every non-wealthy child. 

But there is plenty Biden can do even without Congress. Through aggressive use of antitrust enforcement and other pro-competition powers at his disposal he can open up markets currently cornered by monopolies in everything from agriculture to digital technology. In so doing he’ll provide space for new companies to grow, and with more employers bidding for their labor and talent, employees will see their incomes grow, too (see Barry Lynn, “How Biden Can Transform America,” page 20). Through executive actions and administrative decisions, he can give communities and citizens greater freedom to make decisions that affect their lives. For instance, he has already pledged to increase the ceiling on the number of refugees the U.S. accepts from Trump’s historic lows, and he can empower municipalities to publicly decide whether to accept more locally (see Daniel Block, “How Biden Can Use Federal Power to Liberate Localities,” page 7). If they do—and they are likely to, as support for refugees has also climbed over the past four years, especially among Republicans—Biden can raise the national ceiling even further. It’s an easy, unilateral step he can take to make the United States more inclusive by welcoming some of the world’s most vulnerable while also giving average Americans a sense of control over the nation’s borders.

As he acts, Biden must be sure that what he’s creating is freedom and equality of opportunity for everyone. For Black Americans and Native Americans, inheritors of the legacies of slavery and genocide. For Americans whose ancestors were from Asia and Latin America, India and Jordan, Poland, France, and Ireland. For rural people and urban ones. Evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. Men, women, nonbinary people, and, most certainly, children. For Americans, a people defined by this quest, tasked by the preamble of the Constitution to promote the common good and individual liberty across generations.

This is a framework that can unite the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic coalition. It compels patriots to fight for both racial justice and the health of the rural and small towns in the Midwest, delivering for constituencies that defeated Trump while attracting Trump Democrats back into the fold. Because it’s a platform that harkens back to a bipartisan tradition that included Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, it also has valence for moderate Republicans and center-right independents. Its focus on promoting freedom, enterprise, and fairness comports to the values of the interior West and Greater Appalachia, as well as the Yankee Northeast and the Pacific Coast. In short, it’s an approach that has a chance of building a coalition big enough to win what will be a long hard struggle for America’s soul.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. But we have to try. If liberal civic nationalism fails to carry the day, I doubt there will be a United States 25 years from now. Because ethno-nationalism can’t win democratically—it really is a minority position—authoritarian power grabs will become more audacious, undermining the rule of law and the legitimacy of elections, court rulings, and legislation. In a time of heightened crisis—war, terrorist attacks, sequential pandemics—the country could well shatter on regional lines, as our component “nations” move to protect themselves from one another. This could occur peacefully, as seems to be happening in the UK, or violently, as it did in Yugoslavia. But it’s foolish to presume that it can’t happen here. North America would become fractious, unstable, and far weaker than it is today. Parts of the former U.S. would almost certainly descend into autocracy, and they’d probably have nuclear weapons. They’d likely form alliances with entirely different foreign powers. Hopefully, they’d avoid war among themselves, but the chance of it can’t be denied. 

Such are the stakes.

The post How Joe Biden Can Help Forge a New National Narrative appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Joe Biden’s grand plan sure sounded right for the final weeks of the campaign. In this time of pandemic and economic upheaval, learn from the hard lessons of the Great Recession and spend big to “build back better.” Focus on jobs, clean energy, infrastructure, and expanding the Affordable Care Act. It was to be nothing less than a new New Deal. Or, as Vox put it in August, Biden is “self-styling as the next FDR.”

Well, Joe Biden did win big. But Democrats did not carry the Senate—and even if they are successful in the Georgia runoffs, their hold on that body will be too tenuous to deliver the trillions of dollars in spending Biden promised. The emerging consensus, as described by The New York Times, is that Biden cannot drive a series of expensive programs forward but must be content to “nibble at the edge of tax policies” and other micro measures while bracing for a sluggish recovery.

And that’s the optimistic take. From day one Biden will also have to parry the populist-tipped thrusts of Republican Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and other Trump-inspired contenders for 2024, and perhaps of Trump himself if he seeks to reclaim his crown. Biden might also find himself under assault from the left wing of his own party, sometimes wielding the same arguments as anti-corporate Republicans.

The prospect gets ugly fast. Former FCC Commissioner Reed Hundt and others have charged Barack Obama with “wasting” the financial collapse of 2008 by not pursuing deep structural fixes. Faced with an even graver set of challenges, Biden might never get a chance to prove that he’s capable of true reform. Instead, he faces two years as a hostage of the Senate, followed by two years of panic as the MAGA troops muster outside the White House gates.

But what if Biden instead chose to follow through with his promise to transform the nation, only using different tools than he envisioned in the campaign? The fact that he will enter the White House knowing that a Keynesian stimulus is off the table could prove key to his ultimate success if it inspired his team to find smarter ways to achieve its goals.

One set of tools offers the promise of true transformation, without the need for large sums of money or strong congressional support. This is the use of America’s vast suite of anti-monopoly laws already on the books to address the extreme and growing concentration of private power that has harmed the economic and political well-being of almost every American. An anti-monopoly agenda would enable Biden to frame, direct, and drive deep structural reforms tailored to deliver everything from better health care to better jobs to real solutions to the climate crisis, and to create opportunity and stimulate investment and innovation across the entire economy. Such an agenda would even offer ways to steer political debate in a more constructive and civil direction.

Rather than button himself into a beige cardigan next to the White House fire, President Biden can stride forth as a second Harry Truman, taking the fight to the thieves and bullies and demagogues while telling a story of America that explains who broke our nation, how they did it, and how we can fix it.

Fully understood and embraced, anti-monopolism offers Biden the opportunity to establish the foundations for a 21st-century political economy that is fair, just, safe, prosperous, and sustainable, and to do so on the cheap. Even better, anti-monopolism offers him the chance to establish a liberal political regime in America able to protect his achievements for decades to come.

The idea that monopolists pose some sort of threat to the public weal is now widely accepted. In the case of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, for instance, three of every four American voters favor some sort of breakup of the corporations.

Reaction against extreme concentration of wealth and power has in fact played a large and growing role in the nation’s politics for more than a decade. In 2008, Obama’s promise to fight farm monopolies proved key to his win in the Iowa caucus. When he then failed to deliver, and instead bailed out the biggest of banks, populist anger powered the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. That same anger was a key to Bernie Sanders’s shocking rise in 2016, and to Donald Trump’s even more shocking victory that November. And it played a big role in the Republicans’ strong showing in 2020, as Trump, aided by supporters like the Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, continued to paint Democrats as supercilious servants of financiers and data barons.

Since 2016, elements of the Democratic Party have made big advances in steering the raw anti-wealth and anti-elite anger in a constructive direction. Elizabeth Warren led the way in June 2016, delivering a speech in which she characterized the rise of monopoly as a fundamental threat to the economic well-being of Americans and to democracy. During the 2020 primaries, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders all built on Warren’s analysis of the fundamental role played by bad competition policy.

Then, in early October, the Democratic-led antitrust subcommittee in the House issued a groundbreaking report that detailed how Google, Facebook, and Amazon exploit their power in ways that threaten America’s democracy and system of capitalism, and sketched how to use anti-monopoly law to break that power. Two weeks later, Democratic state attorneys general played a major role in prodding Bill Barr’s Justice Department into filing the first major antitrust suit against Google. Finally, in December, Democratic appointees on the Federal Trade Commission drove the FTC’s decision to sue to break up Facebook.

The Biden team has clearly paid close attention, and a detailed read of the campaign’s policy papers reveals an assortment of promises to break concentrations of power. The statements are simple and strong. Biden’s “Plan for Rural America” promises to “make sure farmers and producers have access to fair markets where they can compete and get fair prices for their products.” The campaign’s “Agenda to Boost America’s Small Businesses” sounds as folksy as Biden himself in its pledge to “combat corporate power, promote competition, and ensure markets work for everyone so that small businesses have a fair shot.”

Unfortunately, beyond these demonstrations of recognition, there’s little sign that the Biden team comprehends the systemic nature of America’s monopoly crisis, or the full suite of tools available to fix the problem. On the contrary, Biden thus far has left the shaping of anti-monopoly policy largely to the same people who failed to address the threat under Obama, and who generally continue to embrace the old Reagan-era doctrines that treat the concentration of private power as mostly benign. 

To be sure, part of the art of making campaign promises is to leave plans vague enough that everyone sees what they need to in order to support a particular candidate. And in this case, it worked. Simply not being Donald Trump was good enough to give Biden comfortable margins in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

But walking into the White House is different, and the lack of a coherent plan to address concentrated power poses two large and immediate challenges.

The first problem is that Biden’s team does not understand the array of tools available to fix many of the most pressing challenges we face today. Consider Biden’s “Plan to Rebuild U.S. Supply Chains,” which aims to address two grave dangers at one go—the shortages of masks and other protective gear that contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, and America’s growing dependency on China for industrial goods that are vital to U.S. national security.

There is a lot to admire in the document. In the pledge to address “anti-competitive practices,” we see a recognition that monopolists played a role in creating these problems. The plan also focuses on the right industries—semiconductors, telecom, and electricity grid technologies. And it has the right overarching aim. “The goal here is not pure self-sufficiency, but broad-based resilience.” 

But when it comes to fixing the problem, Biden’s team has little to offer. If we mean to force powerful, private, for-profit corporations to spend billions of dollars to build new factories to manufacture the goods we need, the smart use of tariffs, quotas, and anti-monopoly law is essential. Instead, we get a collection of grossly inadequate half measures, in the form of promises to “leverage” government purchasing, to tweak the tax code to “encourage” corporations to act better, and to publish a “Critical Supply Chain Review” once every four years.

Worse, Biden’s position paper takes no account of the fact that the Trump administration has already launched a supply chain war with China over the production of communications gear by the Chinese corporation Huawei. Given how dependent the United States has already become on China for many vital manufactured goods, the Biden team must be strategically prepared to wield all of America’s trade weapons on the first day, especially given that China could at any time reciprocate Trump’s use of industrial embargoes.

The second immediate problem is that a lack of an overarching plan to address corporate monopoly leaves others free to define Biden as a patsy of the powerful. And many Republicans are already doing exactly that, by attacking the president-elect for simply continuing Obama’s pro-bank and pro-Google agenda. Even before the Pennsylvania results had been called, for instance, Fox’s Tucker Carlson was gleefully labeling Biden a “corporate hologram” and warning that “Big Tech will have more than an ally in the White House; it will have a lackey.”

That’s probably not the decal Biden wants on his Corvette before he even drives past the green flag.

To grasp the full potential of anti-monopoly policy both to frame a fresh story of America and to fix many of our most pressing challenges, we have to first remind ourselves of how Americans, from the earliest days, understood the threat of concentrated private power and repeatedly mastered the problem. Look at U.S. history from 1776 to the election of Ronald Reagan and you’ll see two centuries in which the governing philosophy of American political economics centered on how to break or harness monopoly. 

The American Revolution itself was not merely a reaction against certain types of control—such as the British East India Company’s monopoly on commerce. It was also a positive vision of new forms of human liberty. The Declaration of Independence, after all, is about far more than the liberation of the nation. With its claim of absolute equality among men, it is also a declaration of independence of man from man.

To achieve this end, America’s founding generation created what would become the world’s most sophisticated set of institutions, laws, and policies to protect every (white, male) citizen from concentrated private power. While Americans for many decades did not even pretend to extend such protections and privileges to Black people, Native Americans, or women, their commitment to checking concentrations of both political and economic power was revolutionary. They did so first by distributing homesteads designed to enable a family of modest means to care for itself, and second by devising ways to protect those freeholders from private monopolists. In my new book, Liberty from All Masters, I call this legal and policy arrangement the “American System of Liberty.”

The Constitution was the centerpiece. Nowadays, we focus mainly on that document’s intricate system of checks and balances designed to break the power of the state. But the Framers also intended the Constitution to make it much harder for the financier and the landlord to concentrate dangerous amounts of private power. This was made clear in contemporary debates. After Thomas Jefferson called for the Bill of Rights to ban monopoly, for instance, James Madison assured him that the system of checks and balances would also prevent dangerous concentrations of private power. “Where the power, as with us, is in the many not in the few,” Madison wrote, “the danger cannot be very great that the few will be thus favored.”

This same vision of liberty also shaped how the founding generation framed some of the nation’s earliest and most far-reaching laws. This was especially true of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789, passed by the first Congress and signed into law by George Washington. Yes, the ordinance was in part an imperial document, a guide to settling the lands that now make up Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even at the time, many understood that the plan would result in the displacement and death of many, if not most, of the Native Americans living there.

But the ordinance is also a radical vision for engineering a democratic society among the settlers. The document did so first by carving the lands into 160-acre plots and then by subsidizing their distribution to individual families. It protected those properties from being concentrated into a few immense estates by banning slavery, outlawing developers and speculators, and requiring parents to distribute the lands in equal portions to all of their children, both male and female. This was no libertarian utopia. On the contrary, the vision of state power distilled in the ordinance is of a people’s government actively working to build a good society, through public education, the creation of town-sized communities, and equal voting rights for both Black and white citizens. 

In the greatest triumph of the American system of liberty, beginning in 1861 almost a million citizens raised on these small farms organized themselves into armies and joined with freeborn and freed Black people to overthrow the slave power in the South. Little more than a decade after the Civil War, however, came one of the greatest tragedies in American history. Almost as soon as they completed the original promise of the Declaration of Independence by destroying slavery, America’s citizens found themselves threatened by monopolists armed with great piles of capital concentrated during the war. When financiers combined this capital with sophisticated techniques for leveraging the power of the new railroad and telegraph technologies, the result was a sudden and massive concentration of corporate power that led first to the overthrow of Reconstruction in the South and soon to the throttling of democracy throughout the nation.

In the late 19th century, Americans managed to pass two foundational anti-monopoly laws: the Interstate Commerce Act, to outlaw most forms of discrimination in pricing and service by the railroads; and the Sherman Antitrust Act, to break the power of banker-controlled industrial cartels. Both, however, proved inadequate to the problem, and by the turn of the 20th century a small oligarchy centered around the banker J. P. Morgan had captured control of the heart of the U.S. economy. Or, as W. E. B. Du Bois described it in 1935 in Black Reconstruction, his foundational history of the United States, “it was a new rule of associated and federated monarchs of industry and finance wielding a vaster and more despotic power than European kings and nobles ever held.”

Theodore Roosevelt is often depicted as the first true “trustbuster,” and it was his Justice Department that—after being prodded by Ida Tarbell’s groundbreaking investigations into the corporation—used the Sherman Act to launch the breakup of Standard Oil. But Roosevelt himself repudiated the philosophy of trust-busting, believing that monopoly was natural, and the only practical option was to blend state and private power into a top-down command-and-control system of governance. One result was that he left the bankers largely free to concentrate further power, in what was widely called the “Money Trust.”

It was not until the election of 1912 that Americans figured out how to break the power of Wall Street, and in doing so they achieved nothing less than a second American revolution. Woodrow Wilson and his adviser, the later Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, drove a set of reforms through Congress that entirely restructured the American economy. These included the Clayton Antitrust Act (which clarified and strengthened the Sherman Act); the Federal Trade Commission Act (which created the Federal Trade Commission and vested it with vast anti-monopoly powers); the Federal Reserve Act (which established a publicly controlled central bank to wrest control of credit and the money supply from Wall Street financiers); a progressive income tax (to break up personal fortunes and distribute wealth more equitably); and the first breakup of AT&T. 

Wilson called his revolution the “New Freedom,” and 20 years later it served as the foundation for the New Deal. Although many historians depict the New Deal as devoted to centralization and bigness, right from the beginning Franklin D. Roosevelt focused on protecting independent farmers and businesses, while carefully limiting and dispersing the power of bankers and corporate bosses. In fact, even the notorious National Industrial Recovery Act was aimed largely at protecting smaller businesses, albeit through government-run cartels that the Supreme Court later held to be unconstitutional. Then, as the Great Depression persisted, Roosevelt doubled down in 1936 on the fight against the corporate and banking monopolists, in what is sometimes called the Second New Deal. “The struggle against private monopoly is a struggle for, and not against, American business,” Roosevelt said in October of that year. “It is a struggle to preserve individual enterprise and economic freedom.” Soon after reelection, Roosevelt boosted the number of antitrust lawyers at the Justice Department from 60 to more than 600.

Through the middle of the 20th century, Americans wielded traditional anti-monopoly principles to shape a highly sophisticated economic regime based on separating the economy into three distinct realms of policy. Each realm was governed by specific limits on the size and behavior of corporations, all carefully geared to achieve particular political and economic goals.

In the case of corporations that provide essential services and goods, the core rule was an absolute prohibition against discrimination in pricing and terms of service. The Interstate Commerce Act had applied this rule to railroads, and Congress later extended it to other transportation and communications networks, from trucks and airplanes to telegraphs and telephones. 

In the case of industrial firms engaged in applying science to manufacturing, the core rule was that there never be fewer than four corporations competing in any industry, be it the manufacturing of chemicals, metals, automobiles, or, later, semiconductors. In the case of farming, retail, and light manufacturing, the core rule was to protect the independent businessperson and farmer from Wall Street predators armed with chain stores and processing monopolies.

It worked. Wages soared, both because of greater unionization and because employees had more firms competing for their talent. Independent businesses and communities thrived, as the war on chain stores and big banks largely blocked the transfer of wealth to a few coastal cities. And Americans unleashed the greatest period of technological innovation in history.

This vision of independent citizens, and the system of small property ownership designed to achieve it, even proved one of the most important tools for overcoming Jim Crow laws and segregation. Not only did the anti-discrimination provisions in the Interstate Commerce Act provide a key tool for desegregating public transportation, but independent Black-owned businesses and farms also provided essential support in the fight to break white systems of control and extend full citizenship to all. That’s why in the 20th century some of the strongest supporters of anti-monopoly laws included W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall, who was the last Supreme Court justice fully devoted to protecting these laws, which were so foundational to American democracy. 

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his first targets was the American system of liberty. Reagan’s team did not target the hundreds of individual anti-monopoly laws Americans had passed over the course of generations. Instead, they proposed an entirely new philosophy of competition, to govern how we understand and use all existing anti-monopoly law. In place of anti-monopolism’s traditional goal of protecting democracy and the liberty of the citizen, the administration said the laws should instead promote the material “welfare” of the “consumer.” Out were traditional bright-line rules used to structure markets and control the actions of corporations in ways that promoted broad political goals, such as preserving opportunities for upward mobility and personal liberty. In their place, Reagan’s team erected a new system in which economists were to judge each individual consolidation of power based solely on whether it would result in more “efficiency” in the production of goods and services, no matter the larger effects on society. 

This enthronement of efficiency as the ultimate goal of the U.S. political economy, and of economists as the main arbiters of power, marked the single most dramatic ideological reversal in American history, a true intellectual and political coup. And yet the event went all but unnoticed. This was partly because anti-monopoly enforcement had become so successfully routinized by the early 1980s that few Americans thought much about it. It was also because highly influential “progressive” thinkers such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Lester Thurow largely agreed with the underlying goal of Robert Bork and the other libertarian scholars who were advising Reagan. They too favored extreme concentration of corporate power, but, in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, they intended it to be under the day-to-day direction of the executive branch.

In the 1990s, under the sway of these and other thinkers, Bill Clinton’s administration would largely complete Reagan’s overthrow of the American system of liberty. It did so mainly by applying Reagan’s pro-monopoly efficiency philosophy to the regulatory structures designed to govern America’s defense, telecommunications, media, energy, and banking sectors, and to the regulation of international trade. In Clinton’s second term, however, the Justice Department grew concerned about concentration of power over the internet and launched one of the biggest antitrust cases in decades, against Microsoft. 

In the years since, the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations largely operated within the neoliberal intellectual and political framework. The one real exception was the last nine months of the Obama administration, which in April 2016 finally sounded an alarm about America’s monopoly crisis, albeit way too late in their time in office to have any real effect. The result has been a two-stage consolidation of power and control. 

The first stage saw the rise to dominance of corporations like Walmart, Koch Industries, Goldman Sachs, News Corp, Citibank, Tyson Foods, Monsanto, Boeing, and Pfizer. It also saw the dramatic empowerment of Beijing, as many of the monopolists who captured various U.S. markets then chose to sell the factories and technologies under their control to Chinese corporations.

The second stage of monopolization—dating to around the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008—has been driven by the rise of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and a few other digital monopolists. Not only have these corporations grown far bigger than the giants of the first stage, they also have succeeded in capturing direct control over the communications and commercial platforms on which everyone, including the dominant monopolists of 15 years ago, must do business. And they have exploited this choke hold to exercise increasingly direct authority over other people’s businesses and lives.

In recent years, many Democrats have embraced the mantra that “personnel is policy.” If there’s one lesson we should learn from the neoliberal overthrow of anti-monopolism a generation ago, it is that philosophy is policy. Ideology truly matters. Nowhere is this more true than in the American political economy, where the diffusion of neoliberal ideas into both parties resulted in a pyramiding of power and control that would have awed even J. P. Morgan in his prime, as well as a vast and growing series of political and economic disasters.

Today just about every problem Americans face was either caused or made worse by the concentration of power that resulted from the overthrow of the American system of liberty. Monopolists have driven up the price of hospital beds and essential drugs while colluding food processing cartels drive up the cost of chicken, milk, and other staples. They have bankrupted millions of independent businesses and farms, and gutted the economies of small towns and midsize cities across America. Monopolists have undermined U.S. national security and subverted the communications systems on which our democracy depends.

That’s why it’s exactly here that Biden will find his one true opportunity. 

Few of the executive actions the Biden team lists as priorities—such as rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement—would get at the source of any of the domestic problems that enrage so many Americans across the political spectrum. On the other hand, as soon as the Biden team frees itself from Reagan’s consumer welfare philosophy, they will discover a complex system of institutions and laws they can put to immediate use to bend the American political economy back toward liberty, democracy, and prosperity, on the cheap.

On day one, President Biden will be able to strap himself into the cockpit of a governing machine purpose-built during the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations—and fortified by Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and even Richard Nixon—to break power, distribute opportunity, build community, protect security, and engage citizens in constructive activities. This system includes agencies with great untapped powers, like the FTC and the Department of Agriculture, which have far-reaching and long-neglected rule-making authority. And it includes strong anti-monopoly powers in just about every office of government, including the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Defense Department, the Transportation Department, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, among many others.

What could Biden do if he made full use of the anti-monopoly powers the government holds? Consider, for a moment, how these tools could be applied to just a few of the problems that now threaten the American people and the United States.

The next pandemic. Biden can’t do much to lessen the harms of COVID-19, given the Trump administration’s grotesque mismanagement of the crisis. But he can use anti-monopoly tools to make us much less vulnerable going forward, such as by breaking cartels that have cornered the markets for masks, drugs, and other medical supplies. 

Health care costs. Without control of the Senate, Biden won’t be able to complete the Affordable Care Act and achieve universal health coverage. But he can crack down on the hospital mergers that drive up prices and drive down service. He can also use antitrust and other competition policies to block drug company mergers, patent holdups, and other tactics that lead to higher prices, less innovation, and loss of capacity.

Falling real wages. Biden can’t decree a higher minimum wage. But he can use his appointments to the FTC to ensure that the commission uses it powers to stop corporations from imposing noncompete and no-poach agreements that keep workers from changing jobs. And by simply using the Justice Department, the FTC, and other agencies to block more mergers and bust up monopolies, he can increase the number of employers competing to hire each worker. 

Climate. Without the Senate, the Green New Deal is DOA. But Biden can immediately use anti-monopoly to break the power of giant hydrocarbon combines like Koch Industries and thereby reduce their political power and funding of climate denialism. He can also use anti-monopoly laws to crack down on utilities that block people and companies who invest in solar and wind from selling their power on the grid. 

The collapse of entrepreneurship and community. Biden, acting alone, can’t subsidize independent business. But he can use existing antitrust law to protect the upstart firms that have always been America’s prime source of new jobs and new ideas from the predations of Amazon, Google, Uber, and concentrated capital generally. In doing so, he will also restore America’s tradition of promoting opportunity through ownership of family businesses.

Stimulus. Without the Senate, Biden won’t get more than a fraction of the spending he has planned on to revive the economy. What he can do with vigorous enforcement of anti-monopoly laws is open up a flood of private investment. For years, giant reserves of capital have been building up because of the high barriers to entry created by cornered markets. Every market Biden opens to competition creates new opportunities to put more of that cash to productive use. 

Failing rural economies. Biden might not be able to deliver on his promise of providing loans to beginning farmers. But he can use tougher antitrust enforcement and the creation of true cooperatives to free farmers from having to pay monopoly prices for seed, fertilizer, and tractors. And he can rebuild competitive markets for their crops—and for the labor of food chain workers—by breaking the power of the slaughterhouse and food processing monopolists. 

International trade. Biden can’t rewrite any major international agreement on his own. But he can use anti-monopoly principles to guide how he enforces U.S. trade laws, and to ensure that no foreign nation ever be allowed to capture a choke hold over the manufacturing of any good or service vital to American security and well-being.

Arts and literature. Even if he wanted to, Biden wouldn’t be able to subsidize America’s writers and artists, who have found their business models entirely disrupted by the power of Google, Amazon, and other platform monopolies. But he can impose nondiscrimination rules on these corporations and strengthen copyright protections, so content creators can earn a fair market price for their work and never fear retaliation for speaking out against power. 

Disinformation and censorship. No president will ever be able to stop propagandists, social saboteurs, or just plain crazy folks from having their say. But Biden can also use these same nondiscrimination rules to force Google and Facebook to abandon the business models that reward them for spreading information specifically designed to divide and radicalize voters. And he can use anti-monopoly law to stop these corporations from diverting into their own vaults the advertising dollars that—for the past 250 years—have helped to support trustworthy local journalism.

Some members of Biden’s team will surely oppose such a robust anti-monopoly agenda. One reason is fear that doing so will make it hard to keep the votes of the independent and Republican voters who helped put Biden in the White House. Another fear is that taking on Facebook, Google, and Amazon will hurt fund-raising. In short, they will argue that strong anti-monopoly policy makes for bad politics.

But any close reading of U.S. history shows the exact opposite to be true. Anti-monopoly policy is smart politics, both today and over the long run. This is especially true now that the American people have woken up to the problem of concentrated power and are looking for someone to protect them. Surveys show that this is as true of independents and Republicans as it is of Democrats.

The first thing Biden would get from fully embracing anti-monopolism is an easy-to-tell story of what went wrong in America, why it went wrong, how we can fix it, and where we are going as a nation. Biden would also gain the ability to demonstrate that he understands the anger and hopelessness that so many Americans feel about the loss of their prosperity and independence and about the destruction of their families and communities.

Learning how to tell this story will prove surprisingly easy. The beauty of traditional American anti-monopolism is precisely that the language is not technical, and enforcement does not depend on phalanxes of specially trained economists or any of the other “experts” long ago pressed into the service of oligarchy. It is a language Biden himself already fully understands. After all, anti-monopoly is about giving everyone “a fair shot” and ensuring that everyone is treated with “dignity” and “respect.” It is about fighting cheats and crooks and evildoers.

Consider Biden’s speech on the Saturday when CNN finally called the race. “I’ve always believed we can define America in one word: possibilities. That in America everyone should be given an opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them.” That is the essence of the original idea of America, the America the neoliberals broke when they unleashed the monopolists.

The Biden team will also find anti-monopoly policy to be a strategic weapon of great potency.

Fully embrace anti-monopolism, and Biden will find himself able to unify the two wings of the Democratic Party. After all, anti-monopolism will allow him to begin to break down many of the economic and political structures that underlie inequality, the hydrocarbon economy, and even racism, while simultaneously creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors to build new businesses and create more and better jobs. 

Fully embrace anti-monopolism, and Biden can also begin to break the GOP’s choke hold on the Senate and the Electoral College. Strong anti-monopoly policy will, after all, empower Biden to deliver millions of rural Americans from the isolation and humiliation that drove so many of them to Trump in the first place. It will do so by breaking the grip of the agricultural, retail, and transportation monopolists who for 40 years have appropriated these people’s lands, looted their communities, and destroyed their families.

Fully embrace anti-monopolism, and Biden might even be able to begin to unify much of the American people as a whole against the common threat posed to our national and personal security by the monopolists and their allies in China.

An assertive anti-monopolism will even give Biden the ability to scatter the corporate and judicial reactions and reveal them as the empty threat they are. As Wilson did in 1913, Roosevelt did in the 1930s, Truman and Dwight Eisenhower did in the 1950s, Johnson did in the 1960s, and Gerald Ford did in the 1970s, Biden can use anti-monopolism to pit the great majority of American entrepreneurs and investors against the few who seek to engross all opportunity and all power. The burst of public and private legal cases, meanwhile, many making arguments that have not been heard in decades, will overwhelm the judiciary’s already weakening embrace of Reagan-era neoliberal thinking.

By contrast, if Biden fails to seize the initiative, he might be remembered as little more than a woebegone regent for Trump in his exile, in Elba by the Sea Florida. And Democrats should be absolutely honest about what a defensive, cautious, backward-looking, tortoise-like Biden administration will deliver, which might be something like the end of democracy in America and around the world.

Failure to use anti-monopolism to seize the initiative would leave Trump’s Republican Party free to use the same populist rhetoric to divide and scatter the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024, while once again bringing the Koch-funded neoliberal wing of the GOP back into gawky alignment with Trump’s national populist wing. 

Even more dangerous, such a failure would leave Google, Facebook, and Amazon free to exploit their control over our communications and commercial systems to further separate each American into a perfectly isolated bubble of rage, bewilderment, and despair, in ways that might soon shatter forever the ability of either party to communicate coherently with America’s voters.

So we know the road we must take, and why. We even know what action we need to see on Inauguration Day to be sure we are heading in the right direction. 

The opportunity to found a new regime comes along only rarely in America, perhaps once a century. Yet that is exactly what Biden can do. By restoring the American system of liberty, Biden can be the president who connects the United States of the 21st century to the main line of American liberalism and enlightenment stretching back to the nation’s founding. In so doing, he can restore a true people’s democracy that is open, forward looking, wisely internationalist, and triumphant.

Will January 20, 2021, mark the dawn of the Age of Biden? That’s up to Joe to decide.

The post How Biden Can Transform America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After four years of President Donald Trump, Democrats have no shortage of “first day” ideas for President-elect Joe Biden. A team at The American Prospect recently scanned a 110-page set of recommendations published in July by the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force and uncovered what it believes are “277 policies that are clearly within the executive branch’s power to immediately pursue, at least in part.” Biden’s wide circle of advisers have no doubt made some lists of their own.

The urgency among Democrats, however, poses a knotty political dilemma for Biden. The pandemic, climate change, a faltering economy, a continuing crisis of police violence, and a seeming administrative meltdown in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unquestionably present a daunting menu of challenges clamoring for immediate attention. But Democrats have also spent four years railing against Trump’s absurdly broad interpretations of executive power and his pugnacious evasion of legal, political, and journalistic accountability. Any effort by Biden to change policy direction quickly will be met, whether in good faith or bad, by accusations of hypocrisy.

But the president-elect has more tools for staffing the new administration and jump-starting the process of undoing Trump’s policies than may be apparent, including a tool that no president has ever used before—one that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be powerless to block. More on this later. But it’s clear that Biden’s choice of tools and how he deploys them will signal his taste for aggression in using the powers of the presidency.

Staffing the Executive Branch

Reports are already appearing that McConnell is determined, if he’s still the majority leader, to hamstring Biden’s choice of cabinet members and subcabinet officials. Using the Senate’s advice-and-consent power to deny a president wide discretion in picking cabinet officers would break a long-standing norm. But confirmation norms were already shredded in 2016, when McConnell stonewalled Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Should Democrats fail to capture the two Georgia Senate seats up for grabs in January, a GOP majority could impede Biden by slow-walking his nominees and blocking at least some of his preferred candidates altogether.

Past presidents have sought to put their stamp quickly on executive branch policy making through the appointment within the White House staff of key policy “czars.” The term lacks precise definition, but generally refers to advisers tasked with coordinating a specific area of policy across agency lines. A few of these, such as the so-called drug czar, hold statutory offices; their appointments require Senate approval. But most can be appointed without consulting the Senate. President Barack Obama broke new ground in terms of the sheer number of policy czars he appointed early in his administration. Some were conspicuously assigned to advance elements central to Obama’s campaign promises, including a climate czar, an urban affairs czar, and a health czar. The move predictably provoked GOP protest that Obama was doing an end run around the Senate’s advice-and-consent role.

A czar-oriented strategy, however, has one conspicuous limitation: Most czars have no statutory authority. These advisers thus lack the legal power themselves to undo the policies of the administrative agencies that populate the executive branch. The power to sign off on new rules or to issue public-binding administrative orders rests with agency heads and other officers in the executive branch in whom Congress has vested decision-making authority. New presidents thus invariably want to secure Senate approval, as soon as possible, for a new slate of agency heads, along with their key subordinates, who will possess the statutory authority to implement policy changes.

Most of Trump’s agency heads will undoubtedly depart by Inauguration Day. Biden can fire cabinet members at will, and it is doubtful that any incumbents would try to stay on. (Some Trump appointees sit on independent commissions and can be removed by a president only for “good cause.” Biden will have to live with them until their terms expire or—like FCC Chairman Ajit Pai—they decide to leave voluntarily.) Biden is trying to get an early start on appointing successor cabinet members by announcing his choices to run the major executive departments now. The usual vetting that precedes Senate confirmation of administrative officials, however, is likely to take weeks or months, even if the Senate is cooperative. Biden will thus need acting officials to run a number of agencies in the interim.

The Stanford law professor Anne Joseph O’Connell, a leading academic expert on the use of acting officers, recently reported that the statute governing the “acting” title, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, allows a president to make acting appointments to fill many of the more than 1,200 agency positions in the executive branch that require Senate advice and consent. “Actings” generally have the same powers as duly appointed incumbents. But the FVRA also restricts the pool of candidates available to be actings—typically persons who already hold Senate-confirmed appointments or who have worked for an agency already for at least 90 days and at a high enough pay grade—and puts a time limit, usually about seven months, on their service.

It seems a safe prediction that, when President Biden uses his FVRA powers, there will be Republican howls that he is doing just what Trump did. But it will not be the same. Trump used the appointment of acting officials and a close administrative cousin—an administrative “delegation of authority” from one agency official to a subordinate that allows the subordinate to do yet a third person’s job—to put officials in place who would presumably owe their political accountability solely to Trump and not to Congress. This practice has wreaked havoc with administrative order at the DHS. At this moment, of the top dozen positions in the DHS order of succession, all of which require Senate advice and consent, exactly two are filled by individuals duly nominated, confirmed, and appointed. The duties of every other position are being performed by either an acting official or a senior official formally holding a different post, but to whom the duties of the vacant line have been delegated by administrative order. This is so, even though a GOP Senate majority would have seemed sufficient to get permanent officials confirmed.

Trump’s haphazard approach to the handling of acting appointments recently led to a court decision that the acting DHS secretary, Chad Wolf, is not the department’s lawful head—and thus his orders limiting DACA, the so-called Dreamer program, were invalid. (For reasons not entirely clear, McConnell has kept the Senate from voting to confirm Wolf as secretary of homeland security, although the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted in September to recommend his confirmation.)

Beyond acting appointments, Biden might still be hampered by a recalcitrant Senate. That leads us to a surprising constitutional option—one so obscure that no president has ever used it before. Begin with the fact that, so long as the Senate is in adjournment for at least 10 days, a president can give someone a “recess appointment,” which lasts until the end of the next session of Congress. In other words, a Biden recess appointee taking office in January 2021 could continue to hold that office until December 2022. Of course, a GOP-controlled Senate would try to forestall such a possibility by keeping its adjournments shorter.

But here’s the surprise Biden could spring: The so-called adjournment clause in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution anticipates the possibility of a “disagreement” between the House and the Senate “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment.” Should that happen—for example, if one house of Congress wanted to leave town and the other wanted to stay in session—the Constitution authorizes the president to adjourn both chambers “to such Time as he shall think proper.” If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were amenable, she could propose to the Senate a 10-day period of adjournment, which would be long enough to enable recess appointments. The Senate likely would disagree in order to block those appointments. But that refusal would trigger the president’s adjournment power. With the Senate adjourned for at least 10 days, an entire cabinet and its principal deputies could be appointed.

In 230 years, the adjournment clause has never been used. But earlier this year, the Trump administration was known to be mulling this technique. The conservative administrative law scholar Adam J. White wrote in opposition, arguing that the adjournment power could close down Congress for no more than three days at a time. White’s willingness to buck Trump is admirable, but his analysis is hardly conclusive. The only textual limit placed on the president’s power is the requirement for House-Senate disagreement—and the power granted is not for three days, but for whatever time the president thinks fit. For four years, congressional Republicans, along with Trump’s Justice Department, have argued for reading Article II’s executive powers as generously as the Framers’ words permit. (Miguel Estrada, an icon of the conservative legal movement, argued to the Supreme Court for an expansive reading of the clause as recently as 2014, and the Court, in passing, approved his reading.) During the founding era, the adjournment power elicited virtually no debate. Its actual purpose is obscure; it seems to be a kind of truncated holdover from the Crown’s power to “prorogue,” or dissolve, Parliament. But if Biden wants to play hardball, this clause offers a potentially big bat with which to threaten the opposing team.

Undoing Trump Policies

It will be no small challenge for the Biden White House to populate key positions throughout the executive branch with personnel sympathetic to the new president’s agenda. There is evidence already of some of Trump’s political appointees “burrowing in”—that is, moving from political positions to what are technically senior civil service positions, which will make them more difficult, though not impossible, to remove. Biden will not need his team fully in place, however, to start undoing the Trump administration’s public policy moves.

To begin with, a number of last-minute Trump administration regulatory moves are likely not to have become legally effective by January 20. The Biden White House will thus follow a practice adopted by every incoming administration marking a change of party since Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter. On January 20, there will be a White House directive to administrative agencies to halt not-yet-final Trump regulations in their tracks. Rules not yet sent for publication will be held in abeyance at each agency. Rules sent for publication but not published will be withheld from the publication that would have finalized them. Rules published but not yet at their effective date will be temporarily postponed while the issuing agency considers their withdrawal. In addition, if Georgia’s Democratic candidates win the two Senate seats to be decided in early January, Congress could help Biden by using the Congressional Review Act to void Trump regulations that became final as early as last summer.

Besides formally issued agency regulations that bind the public, a certain amount of what Trump tried to accomplish took the form of presidential executive orders. “Executive orders” come in two varieties. Some are based solely on the president’s constitutional power to manage the executive branch and assign powers within it. Their terms do not directly bind the public. Examples include an early Trump executive order attempting to impose strict limits on the volume of administrative agencies’ regulatory output; orders urging agency action to undermine Obamacare; and an order that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) consider rescinding or revising the Obama administration’s clean water rule.

A second kind of executive order is specifically authorized by statute and may directly affect the public’s legal rights or obligations. Perhaps the best-known example is Trump’s travel ban order, which implemented the president’s statutory authority to restrict the entry of aliens whenever they find that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

What both kinds of executive orders have in common, however, is that they can be rescinded by a subsequent executive order without any prior process. On day one, President Biden could issue an executive order simply repealing each and every Trump executive order he regards as bad policy.

With regard to the rules issued by administrative agencies, such as the EPA, the DHS, and the like, turning the page is sometimes easy, sometimes difficult. The regulations that order public behavior are called “substantive rules.” Most often, agencies can impose substantive rules only after following a lengthy promulgation process, which involves issuing a “notice of proposed rulemaking,” allowing a period for public comment, developing a detailed explanation of the rule to take account of the public comment, publishing the final rule, and then waiting a period of time—usually 60 calendar days—for Congress to review the rule.

Substantive rules—such as Trump’s rollback of clean water protections or scaling back the safeguards of the Endangered Species Act—are the hardest ones to change. That’s because rescinding or even amending a substantive rule counts as a new substantive rule—and probably has to undergo the same process. There is, however, some leeway. First, substantive rulemaking has been slowed since the 1980s by a Reagan-era presidential requirement further elaborated during Bill Clinton’s presidency that agencies seek approval of their regulatory cost-benefit analyses from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget. Those analyses can prolong rulemakings by months. The Biden administration could lighten or remove this consultation obligation.

Second, if an agency has what Congress has defined as “good cause,” it can make a rule effective as soon as it publishes its notice. This process is called “interim final rulemaking.” The agency still has to go through public comment and the other steps, but the rule will be binding even before that procedural gauntlet is run. If a Biden administration agency has good reason to think that delay in revising a Trump rule would be (in the words of the Administrative Procedure Act) “impracticable, unnecessary, or contrary to the public interest,” it could consider an interim final rule.

As it happens, however, a lot of the rules that agencies issue do not actually impose new legal obligations or remove existing ones. They are thus not substantive rules. Instead, they are sometimes policy statements that just inform the public of an agency’s likely administrative priorities. Others take the form of so-called interpretive rules, which purport merely to explain or clarify the legal obligations that exist already under the agency’s governing statute or under substantive rules the agency has issued earlier. Policy statements and interpretive rules are frequently called “guidance”; guidance can be revised or even repealed with the stroke of a pen. It requires no elaborate procedure to promulgate—or to change.

For example, as secretary of homeland security, John Kelly issued a policy statement on February 17, 2017, setting forth DHS priorities in the removability of undocumented aliens. It replaced a far more nuanced policy statement issued by his predecessor, Jeh Johnson. For example, the Johnson policy prioritized removal of persons convicted of serious offenses; Kelly prioritized removal of persons charged with criminal offenses, whether or not convicted and whether or not serious. No procedural constraints delayed Kelly’s jettison of the Johnson policy. No procedural constraint would delay its resurrection.

In sum, Biden will take office with a robust set of tools available to reverse course on policies adopted by the Trump administration that too often worked against the public interest. The swiftness with which he acts will no doubt unleash Republican accusations of Biden turning into a Trump-like would-be authoritarian. In fact, many of the tools are utterly routine and well rooted in long-standing administrative and constitutional law. But if a GOP-controlled Senate decides to escalate its resistance to norms of interbranch comity, Biden will have norm-shredding moves of his own available to him. Perhaps awareness of their existence will induce Republicans to retreat from the brink.

The post Why Biden Might Not Need McConnell’s Permission appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When the comic book innovator Stan Lee died in 2018, at the age of 95, he was widely hailed as one of the most significant figures in modern American popular culture. A nonstop hustler who grew up during the Great Depression, Lee was an unmistakable figure, with his aviator glasses, flamboyant mustache, and heavy New York accent. He was central to establishing what became known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe—a world in which superheroes didn’t stay stuck in their own orbit, but regularly interacted to provide endless fodder for new tales of derring-do. Thanks to his cameos in more than 30 Marvel movies, including The Amazing Spider-Man and Black Panther, Lee became an international celebrity, prompting The New York Times to hail him as the true “superhero of Marvel Comics.” 

Yet when a teenage Stanley Martin Lieber, who signed his work under the name Stan Lee, began working in 1939 as an assistant at Timely Comics for eight dollars a week, nothing would have seemed more far-fetched. While Timely enjoyed several successes during World War II, including the introduction of the Nazi-bashing Captain America, business was lean in the postwar era. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when the company reinvented itself as Marvel Comics, that it became profitable, outpacing its longtime rival DC, the publisher of Superman and Batman. That’s when Lee, together with several highly talented artists, decisively broke with the familiar mold of superheroes as paragons of virtue by creating characters with human foibles and struggles. The Amazing Spider-Man, for example, was constantly fretting about his love life, not to mention the health of his Aunt May. The Fantastic Four—Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing—spent as much time quarreling among themselves as battling their enemies. After going bankrupt in issue nine, the Fantastic Four are evicted from their headquarters at the Baxter Building. “Heroes one minute—bums the next!” muses the Thing. “How did it happen to us?” 

With the Fantastic Four and other hits, Lee quickly became the impresario of Marvel Comics. He transformed himself into a celebrity by delivering talks on college campuses, appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, and dashing off an irreverent column that appeared in Marvel’s comic books called “Stan’s Soapbox.” In 1966, the New York Herald Tribune profiled him as a “rangy look-alike of Rex Harrison” who “dreamed up the ‘Marvel Age of Comics’ in 1961.” 

As Lee became increasingly famous, however, his artistic collaborators chafed at his claiming all the credit for the Marvel Universe. In True Believer—a clever title taken from the jocular trademark phrase “Face front, True Believer!,” which Lee used to address Marvel readers—Abraham Riesman, a reporter at New York magazine, takes a close look at the mythology that surrounds Lee. It’s not clear whether Riesman is a Marvel fan, as he doesn’t delve into Lee’s body of work much beyond the obvious high-water marks. But Riesman has done a ton of research about Lee’s life, excavating his personal archive and interviewing numerous artists and writers he worked with as well as his business associates. His reporting starts with Lee’s childhood in New York, and stretches to his final years in Los Angeles. Throughout, Riesman provides an illuminating and reliable account of Lee’s improbable odyssey.

Lee, who was born in 1922 to impecunious Romanian Jewish immigrants, read voraciously as a child, plowing through Shakespeare, Dickens, and Zola, among others. Radio was another influence. According to Riesman, “The evocative and percussive verbiage of golden-age radio would later be echoed in his dialogue and narration at Marvel.” After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School, Lee joined Timely, where he toiled for his tightfisted uncle Martin Goodman, a veteran of the pulp magazine era. Lee had few illusions about his role. “Martin’s mandate,” Lee later recalled, “was to keep the stories simple enough to be understood by young children. We’re not talking War and Peace here.” A stint in the Army churning out propaganda materials helped further hone his writing skills. But the return to civilian life in 1945 turned out to be something of a drag for him. In an outline for a memoir, he referred to the 1950s as “THE LIMBO YEARS.” He felt he was “going nowhere—and how could I keep getting older and older and still be writing comic books?” In 1957, in his mid-30s, he was hitting rock bottom. Sales had plummeted. Goodman ordered him to fire the entire staff. “I was like a human pilot light,” Lee recalled, “left burning in the hope that we would reactivate our production at a future date.” 

With the creation of Marvel and the arrival of three artists—Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Larry Lieber—the dim light finally burst into a vibrant flame. Those artists, Riesman writes, “would end up with an intense ambivalence, if not downright dislike, toward Stan.” Ditko played a central role in devising the character of Spider-Man, as did Kirby in developing a host of other Marvel characters, including the Fantastic Four. Throughout their work together, however, Lee sought to diminish their share of the credit and maximize his own. Lee had come up with what was known as the “Marvel Method.” Essentially, he would explain a scenario to his artists, wait for the storyboards, and fill in the copy with his jaunty prose. 

The comics industry was a Dickensian enterprise in which the writers and artists toiled on a freelance basis. All of the work done at Marvel and rival publications was considered “work for hire” that was owned solely by the publisher, not the writers or artists. The ambiguity of authorship created a lot of headaches down the road. “Comic books were still a fly-by-night industry,” Riesman notes, “that few imagined would survive, much less require specific documentation for posterity.” 

There is no known evidence, Riesman observes, that Lee created the premise, plot, or characters for the fabled Fantastic Four. A bitter feud opened up years later between Lee and Jack Kirby over the actual provenance of the FF, as they were known to faithful fans. Kirby flatly stated that he, not Lee, had invented the characters and plots for the FF, the Hulk, and the Avengers. Kirby ended up suing and receiving a munificent settlement from Marvel in 2014. The debate over authorship may seem esoteric, but, Riesman notes, “billions of dollars have hinged on it. Disney’s livelihood depends on Stan’s interpretation of it. A legal case centered on it came one step away from the Supreme Court and was settled for an unspeakable sum.” 

When it came to the origin of Marvel’s hottest property, the Amazing Spider-Man, controversy also abounded. Lee wisecracked about his own claims of responsibility for the genesis of Spider-Man, “I’ve told this story so often that, for all I know, it might even be true.” An embittered Steve Ditko, who did much of the work on the early Spider-Man corpus, said that Lee was talking through his hat: “Lee started out early with his self-serving, self-claiming, self-gratifying style, of giving credit and then undercutting the giving by taking away or claiming most or all of the credit.” Riesman, for his part, is clearly dubious about Lee’s extravagant claims.

For all the brickbats tossed at Lee by his former colleagues, Riesman doesn’t seem to have his heart in trying to demonstrate that Lee was a supervillain. Lee might have been an indefatigable self-promoter, but without his P. T. Barnum–like efforts, Marvel would never have hit the big time. The quality of the movies can be disputed—Martin Scorsese has decried them as “not cinema”—but Lee’s influence cannot. Today, the man referred to as the “Jewish Walt Disney” is more iconic than ever. The newly released video game Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales features a massive golden statue of a smiling Lee standing next to a diner. The plaque on his plinth reads, “Dedicated with love to the man who nourished the hearts, minds, and souls of True Believers everywhere. Excelsior!” As Lee liked to proclaim, “ ’Nuff said!”

The post The Flawed Superhero of Marvel Comics appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The heated, reclining driver’s seat in my car is more comfortable than any chair in my house, which is nice because I spend a lot of time waiting in parking lots for one or the other of my two sons to emerge from baseball or soccer practice. That’s where I was when I read, with my hand over my gaping mouth, of the aggravated rape of a ninth-grade boy, “Martin,” by his basketball teammates—rape with a pool cue. Martin’s recovery began with six days in the hospital and was followed by nine months of physical therapy, including learning how to walk again. Even with these facts not in question, the adults involved could not initially agree on a name for what had happened. “This was something stupid that kids do that shouldn’t have been done,” said the Gatlinburg, Tennessee, police detective Rodney Burns in state court. “What this case actually is, is much smaller than what it’s been blown up to be.”

Would Detective Burns have had the same flippant assessment of this gruesome crime if the victim had been a girl? In her book, To Raise a Boy, the Washington Post reporter Emma Brown argues that the answer is no. Through expertly gathered research and interviews with parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, and young boys from all walks of life, Brown offers a study of what it means to be a boy in America today—and the outdated notions of masculinity that continue to let our boys down.

For starters, we generally don’t hold boys’ bodies sacred in the same manner we do girls’; boys are apparently too tough to experience physical pain. We deny them access to the full range of human emotions, labeling certain feelings like sadness and fear as exclusively feminine. We don’t give boys the language to tell us when something bad happens to them: Being hung from a hook by your underwear is “just messing around,” and penetration with a foreign object is not rape, but “horseplay.” Real rape happens only to girls. And, finally, we adhere to the myth that boys are unfeeling, oversexed, and naturally prone to violence. These low expectations for boys persist despite a two-decade focus by academics and journalists on what has been termed the “boy crisis.” 

This book raises an important and overlooked question: In a society where boys who are brutalized are left with no words to describe their anguish, should we be surprised that we also have a problem with sexual violence of all kinds? “When we fail to recognize and address violence against boys, not only are we failing to protect boys, but we also may be stoking violence against women,” Brown concludes. “These problems are to some extent intertwined.” 

Already the parents of a daughter, Brown and her husband welcomed their first son against the backdrop of the burgeoning #MeToo movement. Brown read of the sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein on her iPhone as she nursed her baby boy. As similar allegations against other powerful men continued to stack up, she wondered, “How [will] I raise my son to be different?” After her maternity leave, she promptly found herself in the center of the ongoing reckoning: It was Brown who broke the story of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation to the Supreme Court. This experience, coupled with her new responsibility of raising a son, inspired her to get to the bottom of what’s going on with boys and men in America. What she found surprised her. 

“I thought we needed to raise our sons differently in order to protect our daughters,” she writes. “Now, after spending time in the world of boys, I understand that we also need to raise our sons differently for their own sakes.”

When we think about sexual assault, we tend to imagine the victim as female and the perpetrator as male. When the victim is a boy, we imagine an adult, male perpetrator. This picture, although accurate to some degree, is incomplete. About one in four men experiences some kind of sexual violence over the course of his lifetime, ranging from unwanted physical contact to rape, according to a 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. It’s worse for LGBTQ boys and men. Perhaps even more striking, in one recent national study of about 13,000 teenagers, of the boys who reported being victimized 75 percent said their assailant was another child. 

Brown recounts several stories like the assault of Martin by his basketball teammates—boys turning on one another in too many locker rooms, sports camps, and even classrooms throughout our country. Desperate to prove their manhood, and often their heterosexuality, boys participate in violent hazing rituals, endure them in silence, and then turn around and inflict the same torture on younger classmates and teammates. We don’t hear about most of these cases, Brown points out, because they are often hidden “behind a shield of well-intentioned confidentiality” meant to protect minors.

These violent rituals exemplify a theory advanced in Boys Adrift, a popular parenting book by Leonard Sax that I read several years ago. Discussing the importance of community-recognized rites of passage from childhood into adulthood, Sax warns, “If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own.” We see this thirst for rites of passage in boys’ bragging about real or imagined sexual conquests. “If two people are having an argument,” a California high school senior tells Brown, “one easy demeaning roast is ‘Oh, you’re still a virgin.’ That’s such a big thing to say.” In one school, a group of kids tells Brown that boys talk about their “ ‘body count,’ the number of girls they’ve had sex with.” Body count: a phrase used in war to determine which side is winning. There it is—the link between sex and violence.

Besides the raw brutality of what happened to Martin, the most haunting part of his story is that he heard the screams of other boys being attacked, and he knew he might be next. Martin managed to call his mother to tell her what was happening, but when he got on the phone with her, he couldn’t get the words out. “I was going to tell her, but I didn’t know how to say that,” he later said.

One national survey, published in 2016, showed that one-third of young men aged 15 to 19 have never spoken with their parents about birth control, sexually transmitted infections, or how to say no to sex. At the same time, students are getting less sex ed in school than they were a generation ago. If they’re not accustomed to having low-key, instructional conversations with the adults in their lives about their bodies and sex, then how can they be expected to get the right words out when they are afraid, ashamed, or in pain? And if parents don’t talk about sex, kids will track down the information elsewhere. The most likely source is online pornography, which can teach unrealistic and even brutal lessons about intimacy. Most importantly, Brown’s reporting suggests that when parents communicate warmly and openly with their sons about sex, birth control, and mental health, it makes a difference. Brown cites a conversation with Carolyn T. Halpern, a developmental psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who seems to have to beg parents to talk to their kids. “I sometimes think that parents get lulled into thinking it’s all about their peers and they don’t care what I think or what I say. That’s just not true,” Halpern says. “They actually are listening. They’re just pretending not to.”

One sees this same parental resignation in the portrayal of sexting as “an emerging, and potentially normal” part of teen development, according to a journal article Brown references. She approaches the subject with the professional impartiality of a reporter, but I see this expert analysis as evidence of a cultural attitude that says because an activity is prevalent, it must be okay. As a mother of two teens, I don’t understand impressing on my sons that their own bodies are private and that sex is—like paying taxes and drinking alcohol—for adults, and then turning around and telling them it’s okay to engage in sex talk and to share nude photos with other minors on their iPads. That would be paving a road to embarrassment and regret. 

Although there is a cavernous silence in homes and schools on the subject of sex, thanks to #MeToo we are having a nationwide conversation about consent, albeit often with a rule-of-law approach, sometimes guided by oversimplified slogans: No means no, and Yes means yes. In one of the most powerful sentences in her book, Brown writes, “Consent is a low bar.” Indeed, it is: The word conjures a reluctant yielding—Okay, I guess so, rather than Yes, absolutely! Our young people are routinely in situations where their willingness to participate is in question, and the persistence of the old narrative that “boys pursue while girls play coy” only confuses the transmission of subtle signals. Brown empathizes with a high school senior who told her, “I think it’s tougher to court these days, know what I mean? If you want to date someone, if you want to pursue somebody . . . if you ask repeatedly, persistence is one thing that people look for. But also, if you do that, it could be perceived as sexual harassment.” Brown suggests a two-part message to resolve this confusion: First, girls like sex too and are not waiting to be lured; and, second, “no” means what it says—it’s not a trick. “If we don’t make that clear, if we leave our sons unsure whether persistence is cute or creepy, then we’re setting them up to overstep another person’s boundaries,” she argues. This approach calls on girls and young women to also be forthright in their intentions and communication. 

Better signals around desire and consent won’t, however, address the need for healthy rites of passage. If bullying doesn’t make a boy into a man, and premature sex doesn’t make a boy into a man, then what does? Jewish boys study for a bar mitzvah and Catholic boys for a confirmation. Generations before us relied on young boys to milk cows and harvest fields and fight wars. We need new rites of passage for boys, or they will continue to create their own. 

In the meantime, during her travels for this book, Brown found many inspiring teachers and mentors who are showing little boys how to manage their feelings and older boys how to intervene when they hear disparaging talk about women or see encounters that are headed toward dangerous territory. In short, they are showing boys how to be men. 

One of the many programs Brown highlights, Chicago CRED (“Creating Real Economic Destiny”), founded by former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, began as a job training program in the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. The program initially focused on resume writing, but the CRED mentor Paul Robinson tells Brown, “What we discovered was how much more they needed.”

Brown interviewed one of Robinson’s mentees, 24-year-old Jamon Lynch, the middle child of five kids who grew up without their dad. Lynch was 17 when he was charged with his first felony. In 2016, CRED helped him find work and study online for his high school diploma. “If I woulda met Paul in middle school, I woulda never been locked up, ever,” Lynch says. “I feel like he saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” 

Another Chicago-based program, Becoming a Man, seeks to catch boys earlier, ideally before they get caught up in the criminal justice system or worse. “I got into this work to break the cycle of fatherlessness,” says Ramirez-Di Vittorio, who grew up mostly without his own father and developed the group therapy and mentoring program for middle and high school students. He gathers the boys into discussion circles and teaches them how to identify and deal with their feelings. “We embrace our softness,” he says. “It’s not embracing a feminine skill—it’s a masculine skill, to be soft.”

Brown wraps up her stirring account of boyhood with the story of Alex Thompson, a senior at Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown Day School who, in response to the backlash against #MeToo, cofounded a group called Boys Leading Boys to fight sexual harassment and assault. Thompson, a popular athlete, drew in most of the soccer and lacrosse players and made having conversations about consent socially acceptable. Alex tells Brown, “Young men should care about this, and should intervene to stop other people from being hurt, because it’s the right and honorable thing to do. Most [boys] consider themselves to be moral people. They consider themselves to be good.”

The post The Brutality of Boyhood appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Trump administration was a disaster of our own making. Through decades of laissez-faire policies and a long history of intolerance, our politics managed to elevate a deranged man with apparent authoritarian tendencies to the White House. As a consequence of our collective decision (and skewed electoral system), we were subjected to four years of a remarkably xenophobic administration and extraordinarily incompetent governance. It has been frightening and agonizing in almost equal measure. 

To make sense of the horror, scores of people turned to dystopian fiction. After Trump assumed office, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Upton Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America all spiked in sales. It’s easy to see why. Never before had the nation elected such a dangerous president, and we were left with totalitarian parables to understand our situation.

Now that the Trump presidency is over, however, what should we look to? One new book makes a strong, if unintentional, case for the work of the legendary filmmaker Mike Nichols. In Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris shows that the director spent much of his career making films and plays about self-inflicted disaster. The Graduate, for example, is about a recent college graduate in the middle of an existential crisis who starts an affair with an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, and then falls in love with her daughter and ultimately destroys their family. Carnal Knowledge centers around a character whose domineering personality and sexual exploits leave him alienated and alone. The Birdcage is about an elaborate plot that a son and his gay father undertake to convince the parents of the son’s fiancé that the father is a cultural attaché from Greece and not the proprietor of a South Beach drag club. (The fiancé’s father is a conservative senator from Ohio who loves Rush Limbaugh.) Of course, the scheme descends into riotous chaos.

This theme was deliberate. “Disaster can reorder our lives in wonderful ways,” Nichols once said. “I passionately believe that in art, and certainly in the theater, there are only two questions . . . The first question is, ‘What is this, really, when it happens in life?’ Not what is the accepted convention . . . but what is it really like? And the other question we really have to ask is, ‘What happens next?’ ”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Nichols was preoccupied with disaster; his life was marked by it. But while he spent much of his career focused on characters who create their own crises, his life began with a series of disasters that were no fault of his own. 

Nichols, born to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1931, was sent by his mother on a ship to the United States when he was seven years old to escape Nazi persecution. There he met his father, who had already fled. His mother later joined them after escaping through Italy, and they settled in New York City. 

Nichols’s boyhood trauma did not end there. After a botched whooping cough vaccination, he was left permanently hairless (later in life, he wore a wig and fake eyebrows). His father died from leukemia when Mike was 12. He was bullied relentlessly in school. 

As a young man, Nichols discovered—perhaps as a form of self-medication—a facility for comedy. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Chicago and got involved in an improv group called the Compass Players, where he met the acerbic Elaine May. Quickly, they developed a remarkable rapport. The two had a short, ill-fated romance, but even after its collapse, they couldn’t ignore their onstage chemistry. Nichols and May starred as an improvisational comedy duo at Chicago’s famous Second City comedy club, and together, they left for New York to train as method actors with Lee Strasberg. When they got gigs on Broadway, they quickly became hits. 

It was, therefore, deeply traumatic to Nichols when May decided to stop working with him in 1961. “Not only had I lost my best friend, I lost my work,” he reportedly said. “I was the half of something.” Harris writes that in response, Nichols left acting and turned to directing. In the 1960s, he directed four hit plays, including Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, and The Odd Couple, winning multiple Tonys. Then he began making movies. His first feature film, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, deals with the breakup of a husband and wife and is a case study in passive aggression catapulting into mayhem. The main characters, George and Martha, have another couple over for a dinner party, where they reveal, after a night of arguing, that they have made up an imaginary son who died in a car crash to fill the void for George’s impotence. (Coincidentally, the film starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who had the most famously tumultuous marriage of their era.)

The Graduate, his next film, begins as a story about an angst-ridden young man who doesn’t know what he wants to do with himself. “I’m just a little worried about my future,” Benjamin Braddock says, almost robotically. It ends with him creating a cataclysm like none other in American cinema: disrupting the wedding of Elaine Robinson (Mrs. Robinson’s daughter) and running out with her after locking the angry wedding crowd inside a glass church. The two hop on a bus, going no one knows where. They sit down happily, but after the exultation of what transpired wears off, their faces transition to blank and ominous stares. Simon and Garfunkel’s haunting song “The Sound of Silence” plays. 

Many critics have read The Graduate as one of the defining films of the 1960s, a blockbuster that captured the essence of a young generation’s discontent—a rejection of their parents’ commercialism and an unwillingness to play by society’s rules. It also unveils an early but undeveloped Nichols revelation: that people have an unconscious tendency to create personal disasters in order to reorient their lives. Notably, The Graduate leaves the audience wondering what happens next to Ben and Elaine. 

The success of the film—adjusted for inflation, it is the third-highest-grossing movie ever made—was enough for Nichols to earn free creative control for much of the rest of his life. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Graduate, and by the age of 36 was living in a Central Park penthouse and driving a Rolls-Royce. While he never made as good a film again, he became one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood. “It’s rumored that you even had final cut at your own circumcision,” Robin Williams joked when Nichols was awarded the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. 

Nichols’s later cinematic work continued to center around characters dealing with calamities of various kinds, although he started to get more political. In 1998, he adapted Joe Klein’s novel Primary Colors, about a fictional character who is all but named Bill Clinton and an idealistic aide who tries to save the presidential campaign as revelations come to light that the candidate is a serial adulterer. The roman à clef shows the complexities of a man like Clinton, the dirtiness of politics, and what can happen when good politicians put noble goals at risk because of their bad personal behavior. 

Nichols continued that thread in 2007 with his last film, Charlie Wilson’s War. The movie features two characters responding to the tyranny of the Soviet Union in the 1980s by developing a U.S. program to arm Afghan rebels. Wilson, a congressman from Texas, convinces the House appropriations defense subcommittee to provide funding and weaponry to the mujahideen through Pakistan, as he’s simultaneously embroiled in an ethics scandal over palling around with drug dealers and strippers in Las Vegas. 

In each of these later films, the main characters respond to and ultimately overcome their own flaws by focusing on work and problem solving. The Clinton analog, Jack Stanton, does so by successfully seeking higher elected office. Wilson does so by becoming obsessively committed to liberating the Afghans from Soviet rule. 

Nichols, too, was known for throwing himself completely into his work, and rarely took time off. And just as his characters responded more proactively and constructively to their shortcomings, he was making transformations in his own life. According to Harris’s book, after meeting and falling in love with the legendary ABC anchor Diane Sawyer, he quit Halcion, a popular sleeping pill he had become hooked on that was later discovered to have psychotic side effects. After a two-year courtship, Nichols and Sawyer married in 1988 and stayed together until his death, in 2014. It was the longest-lasting romantic relationship he had and remained a subject of intrigue in Hollywood circles. One of Nichols’s best friends, Jackie Onassis, was wildly jealous of Sawyer. 

Devourers of Hollywood gossip may enjoy Harris’s book as much as cinephiles and theater mavens will. But any reader will be able to appreciate the biography for providing the most well-rounded and complex look at Mike Nichols to date. It is not a universally glowing portrait but a comprehensive chronicling of how one of America’s foremost theatric talents turned life’s harsh crucibles into artistic fodder. 

It is difficult to speculate on what kind of films Nichols would have made had he lived through the past four years. But now that the Trump era is all but over—we hope—and the immediate disaster is behind us, Americans are left with the same question Nichols wanted his films to provoke: What happens next?

The post The Master of (Self-inflicted) Disaster appeared first on Washington Monthly.